I googled this first. Honestly, I did.
April 19, 2012 9:03 AM

I have finally gotten my iTunes library in good working order, including the album art. However, when I transfer songs to my iPhone, the album art is missing. If you have successfully remedied this situation, I'd love to hear from you.

Technical Stuff:

iTunes (10.6.1) is running on a Macbook which is running Lion (10.7.3)

iPhone is a 16GB Verizon 4.

What I have tried:

Deleting all of the songs from the iPhone and re-transferring them from the Macbook.

Restoring the iPhone from a backup made today, and then trying again to transfer songs over from the Macbook.

Any help would be greatly appreciated.

Thanks, as always.
posted by 4ster to Computers & Internet (8 answers total) 3 users marked this as a favorite
How have you added the album artwork to the tracks?

The most reliable way that I have found to ensure that my iPhone shows the correct artwork is to add the album artwork to each track using a separate tag editor. Even then, it will occasionally forget but far less frequently than when I had let iTunes fill in the artwork.
posted by MUD at 9:18 AM on April 19, 2012


I have had this issue in the past if I added the artwork by dragging it onto the "Drag Artwork Here" window instead of using the Artwork tab in a song or album's Get Info window. You could try removing the artwork from some things and re-adding it in this manner to see if it helps.

I currently use the tool Album Artwork Assistant and it seems to do the job the correct way, FWIW.

(And as a side note, a Smart Playlist with the rule "Album Artwork is False" will STILL not work correctly on iOS, grumble grumble)
posted by bcwinters at 9:20 AM on April 19, 2012


How are you adding the album art?

I've had no problems with iTunes (Mac) transferring art to my iPhone. I add all my art via the "Drag Artwork Here" interface. That stores the image directly in the music file as a metadata tag (ID3, in an MP3).

The only time I've had a problem was when I tried to add a GIF or PNG as album art; some software seems to only work with JPGs.
posted by Nelson at 9:47 AM on April 19, 2012


What version of IOS and/or Itunes are you using? There have been reports of album artwork not transferring over with certain settings applied (notably, the "manually manage music" checkbox.

(iPhones have no trouble with .png files (At least 8 bit ones) indeed, the default image for a "no album art" file is a .png image!)
posted by ShutterBun at 10:02 AM on April 19, 2012


I had album art issues in iOS before I got my "Album Artist" field squared away. You won't see that field on the default iTunes view, but if you right click the headers, you will get a list of optional fields to enable. The simplest thing to do is just make it match the "Artist" field, but it also gives you some flexibility for viewing compliations and soundtracks and stuff as single albums with multiple artists.
posted by Rock Steady at 10:47 AM on April 19, 2012


Isn’t there a check box in iTunes with the option to transfer the album art or not? I know there was for the iPod.
posted by bongo_x at 12:07 PM on April 19, 2012


ShutterBun has it. When I switch the setting in iTunes to "Sync Music" everything came over nicely.

Thanks, everyone.
posted by 4ster at 12:11 PM on April 19, 2012


Awesome, glad that worked for ya.
posted by ShutterBun at 9:54 PM on April 19, 2012


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