Add album art to your iTunes music

Here’s an example of the kind of mess that iTunes gets into. Here, a compilation called Heart of the Gaels has been split across several albums in the Cover Flow carousel ­– one of which doesn’t even have an album cover. An easy way to fix this is right-click on one of the culprits and then choose Get Info from the pop-up window. When the dialogue box opens, make sure that the Info tab at the top is selected and put a tick next to ‘Part of a compilation’ by clicking there. Then click OK.

In this case, something even stranger has happened. This album appears 12 times in the Cover Flow carousel, once for each track. We’ve checked the individual tracks (sometimes labelling inconsistencies can cause this), but there are no obvious problems. To fix this click the first track and then, holding down the Shift key, click on the last track on the album to highlight the whole CD. Right-click on any of the highlighted tracks and then choose Get Info from the pop-up menu.

When iTunes displays a warning dialogue box, just click Yes to ignore it. Look at the Compilation setting at the bottom left of the dialogue and put a tick in the empty box there. Then open the dropdown menu and choose Yes. Although the album clearly isn’t a compilation (it’s by a single artist) this forces iTunes to consider all of the highlighted tracks as part of the same album and will remove all the extra ­– and unnecessary – ­album covers in the carousel. Click OK to confirm the changes.

Sometimes when a CD is added to iTunes it doesn’t carry over the album artwork at all, leaving a big fat hole. Normally, it’s possible to fix this quickly and easily by getting iTunes to do all the work. Just navigate to a track from the album in question (any one will do) and then right-click on the name. When the pop-up menu appears, select Get Album Artwork. If the PC is connected to the internet, iTunes should find the artwork and drop it into place.

If it doesn’t, then find the artwork manually. Launch your web browser and click on the Address or Location bar once to highlight what’s there. Type www.google.com and press Return. Then type the name of the album into the search box, making sure that it’s enclosed with double quote marks. Click Search. When the results come back, click the Images link at the top left of the screen and Google will display all of the images it finds that correspond to the album. Look at the labelling and click one that’s over 10KB in size.

At the next screen, click the ‘See full-size image’ link at the top. Reduce the size of the browser window so it no longer fills the screen and then switch back to iTunes. Right-click on a track from the relevant album and choose Get Info. Click the Artwork tab and then flip back to the browser window. Drag the album cover across to the iTunes Artwork dialogue with the mouse. Drop it in there and then click OK to add the picture.