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‘Get Album Artwork’ for individual track in 12.4


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I frequently want to download iTunes store artwork for an individual track. This has always been easy – right-click on the track and choose ‘Get Album Artwork’. However, this command seems to have disappeared in iTunes 12.4. There is a command in the File > Library menu to Get Album Artwork for the whole library, but this isn’t what I want. Does anyone know what happened to this functionality and whether it’s still possible in 12.4 (possibly with an AppleScript)?

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Unfortunately I misunderstood the command (thought it had just been moved) and so ran it, only after realising it was going through my whole library. :mad: Hopefully no big losses, though I've saved artwork scans I've done separately if I come across anything.

 

I guess I'll submit feedback to Apple, this is an irritating loss!

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Thanks Jon, that's extremely helpful. Many years ago, there was a similar service that allowed you to search for and download iTunes artwork. At some point and update to the iTunes Store broke it, and then Apple added the 'Download Album Artwork' feature to iTunes, and I started using that. Great to see a more expansive service for searching the iTunes Store. Plus, it can be easier for me than even the iTunes feature as my metadata often doesn't quite match with what iTunes uses (particularly for classical music and musicals), so a direct search saves a lot of fiddling about with tags in iTunes.

 

However, I think I have also rediscovered a way to download artwork for selected tracks only from within iTunes! Just by chance I was looking at sort options and found the following:

 

  1. Create a playlist containing the track(s) you want to download album art for.
  2. When viewing the playlist, go to the View menu and choose View As > Songs[ATTACH=full]103[/ATTACH]
  3. Now click on the Album by Artist column header to sort by Album.
  4. If you now click on the same column header, you get a pop-up menu. From here you can choose Get Album Artwork and it will just download artwork for the tracks in the playlist!

[ATTACH=full]104[/ATTACH]

 

This should work in other views too where you can View As > Songs. But for downloading artwork for just a few tracks, a playlist is probably most useful.

 

Thanks again for the iTunes Artwork Finder website. That will be really useful as well (for my DVDs too!).

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Great detective work Jon! That's much easier than my create a playlist method.

 

Thanks Kirk for exploring further and writing it up. I guess the new method makes some sort of sense and it certainly declutters the contextual menus. I just wish I'd known about this change before accidentally running the command on my whole library!

 

One thing that does seem to be missing is the previous contextual menu command to remove downloaded artwork. After I download the artwork, I copy it and embed it in the tracks themselves so the artwork ‘travels’ with them; previously I would then remove the downloaded artwork for neatnesses sake. Anyone seen this? Not a big deal if not.

 

Overall, I have to say that I really like 12.4. The interface is a lot more consistent, the new behaviour of the back button (and ‘cmd-[’) is incredibly useful, and there is good attention to small details like when switching from album to song view, the album you were viewing is selected in the song list (previous versions would dump you at the top of the song list).

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I have certainly used Google images when an album isn't on iTunes, but I find that if the artwork is on iTunes it is much quicker and produces high quality results (there can be a certain amount of hunting around using Google images). As you say, pbGuy, it is worth embedding the artwork in the files themselves, so that adds an extra step when using the iTunes Get Album Artwork.

 

Thanks, Jon_Eric, for the link to album art exchange – that looks like a useful resource.

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