• PC World
• »Software
• »Browsers & Add-Ons

The quickest way to find a CD in a pile of jewel cases is by looking for its cover. Similarly, you can use Cover Flow in iTunes to scroll through your songs and albums, and the iPod lets you do the same thing; the iPod touch and iPhone even let you flick through a Cover Flow view with your fingertip.

But before you can browse your music in this manner, it needs to have artwork. Cover art comes with any music you buy from the iTunes Store (and from other online vendors such as Amazon MP3), but you have to add album art yourself when you rip your own CDs.

Find album art

To hunt down album art for tracks you've ripped yourself, you can employ one of several methods. The easiest way is to have iTunes do it for you (you'll need to set up an iTunes Store account if you don't already have one). As you rip a CD, you can have iTunes check the iTunes Store for album art. To do this, you must select Automatically Download Missing Album Artwork in the General pane of iTunes' preferences. After you finish ripping an album, iTunes will then connect to the iTunes Store and, if it finds the artwork, download it and add it to your library (note that this works only if the iTunes Store sells the album).

Even if the Store offers the album you're looking for, the tags iTunes downloads from the Internet for a CD you've ripped yourself may not match the artist, album name, and song names of tracks in the iTunes Store exactly. So if iTunes can't find the art for an album you know it sells, check how the album is listed in the Store, correct your tags, select the tracks in iTunes, control-click on them, and choose Get Album Art. iTunes will then check the Store again. You can do this anytime for music that doesn't have album art.

If iTunes can't find the album art you want, the best way to add it is to copy graphics from Web sites. You can use many image formats, such as JPEG, TIFF, PNG, and GIF, and you can add album art to all kinds of music files--with the exception of WAV files--and to videos and movies. A good place to start is Amazon.com, which has cover graphics for most of the albums it sells. Find the product page for an album, and you'll see an image of its cover. You can save this image or, in some cases, you can click on it to see a larger version. Small images are 240 by 240 pixels, which is large enough to use on an iPod classic or nano. Large images are usually 500 by 500 pixels, but they sometimes have white borders that you may want to crop.

You can also find album art on other retail Web sites--CD Universe, for example, has large graphics at 450 by 450 pixels, with no white borders. The sites of artists or bands often include album covers as well. And you can do a Google image search (images.google.com), where you can narrow down the results by image size and then follow your chosen image to the Web site that hosts it.

In some cases, you may not find any album art that corresponds to your music: the disc may be too old or too obscure, and some live recordings and other downloaded music simply don't have covers. If you have a physical CD, you can scan its liner notes and add the resulting image. For live music, you could use a photo of the band or performer pulled from a Web site.

Keep size in mind

As I mentioned, you'll find album art in many different sizes--the size you choose depends on how you plan to use the art. In iTunes, the smallest Cover Flow view scales art to 200 by 200 pixels, though you can expand the Cover Flow pane and get images that, on a 20-inch screen, are larger than 650 by 650 pixels. So if you plan to use Cover Flow a lot, you'll probably want large album art: for the best quality in scaling, I recommend using the largest you can find, up to 600 by 600 (the iTunes Store supplies album art at this size). On the iPod touch and the iPhone, images are no larger than 320 by 320 pixels, and on the iPod classic they max out at 100 pixels square. So Amazon's large images--500 by 500--are fine for most purposes.

If you scan your own images, you might want to choose 600 by 600 pixels. In all cases, though, you want to make sure the images don't take up too much disk space because album art inflates the overall file size of your tracks--if you add a 1MB image to every song in a dozen-track album, that's 12MB added to your library, taking up space on your iPod and on your Mac.

When you download album art from the iTunes Store, however, iTunes doesn't add the graphics to your files, but rather it puts them in a central folder on your computer. You can view the graphics in iTunes, and they will accompany your songs to your iPod, but these images aren't portable; if you copy a track to another computer, it won't have the album art.

Add artwork to your files

Once you've found the artwork, you can add it to any music or video files, including those purchased from the iTunes Store (though you cannot change artwork for Audible files).

Artwork Tab: To add artwork to one track, select the track, choose Get Info, and drag the image to the art field.For single files, the easiest way to add artwork is to select a file in iTunes, press Command-I to get its information, and click on the Artwork tab. Either drag a file into the artwork box, or paste a file that you have copied from, say, a Web page (see "Artwork Tab"). Click on OK to save the art. You can even add multiple graphics in this box; just drag an additional graphic into the box before or after the current one, or click outside any existing graphic to make sure it's not highlighted and then paste in the extra graphic.

For multiple files, select the ones to which you want to add album art and then press Command-I. This time, you'll see the Multiple Item Information window. Drag or paste art into the Artwork box, and then click on OK to save it. Note that this action replaces any single or multiple graphics you may have added to the selected files, so this is an easy way to make sure that you have consistent artwork for an entire album.

Another way to add or view artwork for any file is through iTunes' Artwork Viewer. To see it, select View: Show Artwork or click on the last of the four buttons in iTunes' lower left corner (if the top of the Artwork Viewer says Now Playing, click on that text to change it to Selected Item). If the selected tracks in iTunes have album art, the viewer will display it--if not, it will say Drag Album Artwork Here. Drag graphics to this section to add them to the selected files. If you already have artwork in your files and you drag art there, it gets added to, but doesn't replace, the existing artwork. If selected files have more than one graphic, you'll see small arrows on either side of Selected Item that you can use to scroll backward or forward through multiple images. And if you click on an image in the viewer, it will open up in its own window at a large size.

For video files, you can set a poster frame for almost any video you've imported. This is a specific frame from the video that you want to display as artwork. To do so, play the video until you find the frame you want to use and then pause it. Control-click on the video and choose Set Poster Frame.Album Art Widget: This useful Dashboard widget lets you search for and add album art to the currently playing song.

Get a little help

To make it easier to add artwork, you might want to sort your music so you can find all the tracks that are missing art. On his excellent Web site, Doug Adams has an AppleScript called Tracks Without Artwork To Playlist 2.3 (payment requested) that can create a playlist of these tracks for you.

Although many programs seek out album art, I like Alastair Tse's Album Art Widget 2.9.2 (payment requested). This Dashboard widget can search a number of different Amazon .com sites from around the world, as well as Google Images and other sites, for album art; display what it finds; and add it to the currently playing track in iTunes (see "Album Art Widget").

[Kirk McElhearn writes about Macs, iPods, books, music, and more on his blog, Kirkville.]