More cover art manipulation frustration...
I suspect there are ways to work with cover art that do NOT incur this problem, but it seems too easy to occur vs. very hard to un-do.
Scenario:
Let's say I have dozens of tracks by an artist. Some are from original albums, some from "greatest hits" and other collections, some random individual tracks. I want to give the original albums their original cover art. When a track is on an original album (often an LP) AND a greatest hits CD or other collection, I keep the best quality track, but want to retain the REAL album name it came from, AND give it the original album's cover art.
What happens is, when a cover image is Pasted in from the clipboard, therefore it has no name, MC names it using pattern Album Artist - Album name. I never use this pattern anywhere else, but it's built into MC's cover art system.
The problem is, I only want to retain one copy of a given song -- the best copy I have, whatever the source. For instance, I rip from LP to get 12 tracks, but also have 2 of them on a collection CD. So I want to end up with 10 tracks from the LP, plus the 2 tracks from the CD. But I don't want to give the CD tracks the name of the LP album because that's not where they came from.
To add cover art, I select all the tracks with the same Album name, then paste in that album's image. No problem.
However, I then paste the same album cover art into the two tracks from the CD collection, to recognize where they originated. Ooops -- this changes the cover art of ALL the tracks on the collection CD, because they all have the same Album name and that's how the cover art gets named automatically when Pasting.
And once the original art has been overwritten, there's no un-do. I have to go get it again from another track or my source and paste it back in. But no, that just repeats the problem. So I save the cover art as an image file in a folder, give it a DIFFERENT name, then located it via MC's Add From File dialog (which is difficult to navigate with many files).
Obviously there are workarounds if I changed the order of steps or compromised on the Album name. (If you're curious, I do not want to store cover art in the music files, and I don't use folder.jpg because my folders are at the artist level, not by album.)
It just seems too delicate, to easy to change one file's cover art and have the unintended consequence of changing others, with no warning and no simple way to revert. In fact, the change to other tracks of the album is not knowable without looking at them, and they might not even be in the current view or tree leaf. And, the pasted-in image that got overwritten might have been the ONLY copy the user has on-hand (happened to me dozens of times: I put a cover image in months/years ago, then it inadvertently got overwritten by a different image that MC gave the same name, and I don't have the original image without digging into my backups, a tedious job).
An improvement would be to ask for verification when overwriting a cover image, and/or when renaming a cover image automatically. Also a Paste un-do would be wonderful, or second choice, an automatic rename of the about-to-be-overwritten image file (append _OLD" or something), just-in-case.
Part of the challenge is the notion of "cover art", which while being the usual source of a music file's image, is not always. The user might prefer images of artists, or still shots from videos, or other non-cover images -- many of them not tied in any way to an "Album" name.
The ultimate improvement would be allowing user-specified "rename cover art file from properties", same as is allowed for "rename files from properties" -- rename a file, create/change a subdirectory, even move the location -- all based on music file properties. This could be used to allow all manner of image file organization, and provide several ways to avoid cross-track image interaction, while still supporting the current album-oriented naming style for those who prefer it. In other words, allow for image files exactly the same file-level control as for music files.
PS: An extreme example exists on my system. I have hundreds of tracks with a cover art image of Linda Ronstadt's spanish-language album, because it somehow got on my system with name Cover.jpg and these tracks all have that name in the Image File field. I deleted Cover.jpg but the images still appear for all the tracks, presumably due to caching, unless I select each track and delete the image reference. If this is not due to caching, then it likely is due to the images being stored in the music tracks (MP3) though for a long, long time I've had MC set to NOT store images in tracks. Even when set this way, sometimes it seems to do it, or maybe not "not" do it (I already reported a problem with MC transferring images to my iPod even when told not to.)