Apple iTunes tips and tricks iTunes album artwork tips

Get iTunes album art

Sleeve or album art is a quick way to identify music in your iTunes library. If you haven’t already downloaded this, go to Advanced > Get Album Artwork > Get Album Artwork. You’ll need an iTunes Store account and must be connected to the internet. The process can take a while.

Once it has finished, you may find that some of your albums still don’t have any artwork associated with them. This is normal, as iTunes can’t retrieve artwork for albums that it doesn’t stock in its own online store.

Add artwork automatically to iTunes

iTunes can add artwork automatically as you copy songs from CDs. To turn this on, go to Edit > Preferences and select the Store tab. Tick the box beside Automatically download missing artwork.

You’ll see the message Are you sure... Click Enable Automatic Downloading > OK. You’ll need an iTunes Store account and you’ll need to be connected to the internet.

Open/close the iTunes Artwork Viewer

The iTunes Artwork Viewer is a small box that sits on the bottom left-hand side of the player’s window and displays a picture of the album sleeve for the song that’s playing.

To open it, click on the button with the symbol of a square with an upwards arrow. Clicking the circular button with the right-pointing arrow just above the box will switch between Now Playing and Selected Item modes.

Using cover flow in iTunes

Cover flow gives you a pictorial representation of your music library. 

To access cover flow, click the third View button, a symbol of a square with lines either side. This switches the top portion of the iTunes library browser to Cover Flow mode.

Flick through the sleeve art of all your albums using the scroll bar underneath. 

With Cover Flow switched on, click the small icon of a square with arrows pointing out of it in the bottom right of the Cover Flow box to expand to full screen. This allows you to flip through your album sleeves in a larger format.