I actually am not even going to use the Custom Art thing. I would rather just duplicate the image in each directory where an image doesn't exist because this means I don't have to make a Custom Art folder on 7 computers and it also means that I can know that every directory has album art.
Now I just have to find a few missing cases with art. I am scanning and it's going good, relatively speaking. I noticed two albums I have are mainly white (Jewel & Fleetwood Mac) and both of which have terrible bleed through upon scanning where you see the text on the other side. To make matters MORE interesting, I checked Amazon. You can see the same thing! Therefore, they just scan them in by hand?! You would think the record labels could provide digital high quality images of their cover art! You know that the companies have super high resolution copies which don't have to be subjected to the laser printing which leads to moire and lower quality in general.
Anyway, we have 170 album covers scanned in at the moment with an estimated 500 total so we are doing relatively well. Here are my steps for anyone interested:
1. Pull out album art and wipe with clean tissue paper.
2. Place on flatbed scanner with small gap above it but flush against right side.
3. Alt + S to scan the selected area (I always leave it selected to the correct area)
4. Repeat about 40 times.
5. Macro F2 to apply Auto Contrast, Auto Color, & Auto Levels then minimize each image.
6. Open one image at a time, crop, and fix obvious issues, like missing areas or dots of dust, miscoloration, etc.
7. Save at 100% quality JPG. I end up with about 300KB for mostly white images or 1.5MB for more complex items.
8. We save images to a special folder on my server with random letters & numbers so they don't overwrite. I then go through one by one and rename to Folder.jpg, copying them to the appropriate folder. The scanning process is around 1 minute per image (using slower USB 1.1 with newer scanner). The fixing and saving process takes a bit over a minute. Finally, relocating takes around 10 seconds at most. This yields a total of maybe 3 minutes per image.
The images are scanned at 300 DPI, giving me about 1500x1500 to work with. I have the crop feature set to 1200x1200 and I am able to crop quite a bit of border off without requiring interpolation. In other words, I never crop it less than 1200x1200, so I am taking more information and scruntching it vs. taking less and enlarging it. This has been working quite well. I will eventually catch up with scanning and have to wait for the ripping process because scanning is much faster than ripping!