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[steveklein]

My cover art situation is a mess and I'd wager I'm not the only person in this predicament.

My music is sorted into folders by artist. Within each artists' folder, there is a folder for each specific album. The contents are of course, the mp3s, and typically a .jpg file (named [Artist] - [Album].jpg)

However, I've got quite a few albums where the cover art file is named something else, is in a different location, is stored within the mp3 themselves (I think) or is missing altogether.

I applaud, clap, and whistle all the work which has gone into MC to getting the cover art situation manageable. However, since I started with such a disorganized library, even MC with all its power is struggling to easily solve my problem.

Really, I don't have a preference where all my cover art is stored, just that it is there and will display both within MC as well as on my mobile devices (iPods, phones, etc). I suppose the natural place would be within each album's folder as [Artist] - [Album].jpg as that is where the bulk (maybe 70%) of it is to begin with.

I want to be careful not to lose any artwork in the process, but I'd really, really, REALLY like to figure out a way to get ALL my artwork in a standard location, and deleting any artwork that doesn't need to be there (is there any point in having it stored within the mp3 itself? If so, I'll want ALL the mp3s to store the jpg in the file itself.

So, given my problems you MC library experts, what would you suggest the best way to address the situation?

As a sidenote, I don't really know what thumbs.db represents which is abound throughout my folders. I tend to just not mess with things that I don't know about.

[JimH]

Windows makes the thumbs.db files.

The wiki has info on cover art.

[HiFiTubes]

SPARTA used to have a tool which would copy cover art out of tags, I think, to a disk location; you could start "fresh". Such a native feature would be useful to achieve what you describe, but the wiki may have more answers.

I like having the art stored next to files and labeled for artist/album as you suggested, but one time I did use MC to import all images from my "music" drives, and copied all the files to one folder - to use with an album art screensaver.

[Lasse_Lus]

SPARTA used to have a tool which would copy cover art out of tags...

yep, but you can do that from within MC as well -->
Coverart\save cover art to external location specified in options

[HiFiTubes]

So you could select all files and run that? Sounds good.

[Lasse_Lus]

yes

[kewe65]

Windows makes the thumbs.db files.

The wiki has info on cover art.

and those files are creating by Windows to cache the thumbnails created when you use Windows Explorer to view image files.  Useful if you have a computer whose graphics performance is average to below average.

They are harmless to remove - just google 'thumbs.db'.  And you can stop them from being created by editing the Group Policy, a powerful tool that many people dont really use.  one place for instructions on this is here: http://www.technoleros.com/turn-off-caching-of-windows-7-thumbnails-in-hidden-thumbs-db-files/

Good to know especially if you include all file types in views within MC...

[stefansmith]

Here's the directory/file structure I use:

Artist -> (Year) Album Title -> 01. Song title
                                          02. song title....
                                          folder.jpg

That way, even if the tags get wiped out in some kind of freak accident, they can still pretty much be recovered using an auto fill batch process, and the cover art is found every time.