madom, I'm not sure if what you want is what I'm thinking of, but if you want a smartlist that plays whole albums only and your non-album or incomplete album songs have no album tag, then simply put this in the blank:
-album=[]
If all or most of your songs have an album tag, MC has a "complete album" thing which I don't think is really part of the ID3 tags, but, from the help file:
Complete Albums
Media Center can automatically display complete and incomplete albums. An album is considered complete if all the files with the same [Album] value in the same directory:
· are sequentially numbered tracks starting at 1
· have at least 2 files or 10 minutes of audio
· are Audio and have a non-empty [Album] value.
If you meet every requirement for the complete album field to be acccurate, which is plenty, use this string:
[complete album]=1
This isn't accurate for me because I have multi-artist albums that aren't in their own exclusive folder, I have a missing track on an album because the same recording was on a previous album and I also sometimes use three digits in the track number field for albums with more than one disc (101, 102, 201, etc.).
You can also manually find what you want by opening the library tree, audio, then click on Artist/Album. If you haven't altered the view scheme of this screen, then there should be two columns, artist and album, at the top. First, select the artists you want, then select the albums you want. Don't know how stupid you are, but in case you don't know, hold down Control to make multiple selections, apologies if you know this. When you have all the albums you want, right click on the last album you selected, click on send to, playlist, create playlist. Don't click back in the artist column or the album column will reset. You can also just highlight all the files or go to edit, select all, drag and drop, etc.
And what IanG said, you CAN apply album thumbnails to playlists. Just go to your main library screen, right click on the title of one of the columns, list style, album thumbnails. Now, you don't need to have all of your cover art stored, but I do for most of my albums because it looks nice. If you don't have the cover, it just shows a blank square with the title underneath. Highlight which albums you want, right click and send to playlist or drag and drop.