iTunes album artwork question
How does iTunes 7.x handle album artwork? I am in the process of digitizing some of my albums and I noticed something. After I imported the songs into iTunes I used the 'Get Album Artwork' feature and the artwork downloaded with no problems. I then dragged the artwork from the window it displays in so I could see what size the file is and it was 720 KB in size so I downloaded the same image that was 40 KB in size, but when I replaced the artwork iTunes downloaded with the image I downloaded the size of the files went up by 300 KB.
I have bought many songs/albums from iTunes and a while back I replaced the artwork that came with the songs I purchased and freed up many MBs of space by using smaller sized images which is why I am confused as to the increase in size.
I have bought many songs/albums from iTunes and a while back I replaced the artwork that came with the songs I purchased and freed up many MBs of space by using smaller sized images which is why I am confused as to the increase in size.
Comments
At any rate, iTunes stores images in either JPG or PNG format. With some complicated exceptions I don't want to get into now, this is usually done by embedding the artwork into each song file. If you added the same ~40K image to every song in an album with seven songs, a collective increase of around 300 KB would be expected.
For the first artwork you had to have been 720 KB, I'd suspect it would have to have been something like a 600x600 PNG file.
I'm a little confused since I'm not sure, when you say "downloaded the same image that was 40 KB in size", how you went about doing that. The first artwork I take it came from the automatic iTunes download. The second time was by going to Amazon or Walmart of something like that to get a smaller version of the same artwork
When I first imported my CDs I used an app called 'Clutter' to retrieve the artwork, which I believe got the images from Amazon. Now, I use Google because I can see the size (dimension and bytes) of the image before downloading it.
At any rate, iTunes stores images in either JPG or PNG format. With some complicated exceptions I don't want to get into now, this is usually done by embedding the artwork into each song file. If you added the same ~40K image to every song in an album with seven songs, a collective increase of around 300 KB would be expected.
That depends on how you add artwork. If you drag an image to the pane that displays the artwork then that image is added to the file, and if multiple files are selected then they all get the image added. If you select mulitple files, 'Get info' then drag an image to the 'Artwork' window then that image replaces every image in the file which is why I am confused the file size increased when I replaced a 720 KB file with a 40 KB file.
Starting with iTunes 7.x there is a folder called 'Album Artwork' which makes me think there is only one "main" image file and it is referenced by the songs, but I do not understand the folder hierarchy or how to read it or modify it with a different image.
If you add the artwork yourself then you embed it in the file (each song has its own copy). If iTunes 7 adds the artwork via the Get Artwork feature then it sticks a single copy in the album folder and tells all songs from the album to reference it.
The advantage is obvious, it takes less space. The disadvantage is equally obvious, if you transport the music then you no longer have artwork for it.
Therefore when you replaced the iTunes Get Artwork cover that downloaded with your own smaller image you actually switched a single large piece of album art for a bunch of smaller pieces of artwork.
I have no idea how to force iTunes 7 to either switch all artwork to the single piece per album folder (excluding deleting all artwork and hoping Get Artwork can replace it all) or forcing the Get Artwork feature to embed the artwork in each file (manually aside).
If iTunes 7 adds the artwork via the Get Artwork feature then it sticks a single copy in the album folder and tells all songs from the album to reference it.
There's something I hadn't caught on to -- but then again, I've only tried Get Artwork twice, and the first time I tried it I canceled it, because I'd been expecting iTunes to only get artwork for songs I'd selected. I got nervous when I saw iTunes scanning through my whole library, worried it would replace good artwork I already had.
I prefer to know that album artwork will automatically follow a song wherever it goes, but there is something nice about the efficiency of sharing the same images among multiple songs, especially if you're going to use big PNG images instead of more compressed JPEG images, or if you want to have more images than just the front cover art.
Here's his post:
"To Clarify: iTunes 7 ALBUM ARTWORK Issues...
--------------------------------------------------------------------------------
There seems to be some confusion going around with regards to album artwork and iTunes 7 (and now 7.0.1), and how it should be handled and what features do and don't work as expected right now.
I am therefore going to attempt to clarify this situation, based on my own specific experience and testing of these issues in iTunes 7.
But first, a bit of background:
In iTunes 6 (and prior versions), the only way to add album artwork to a track (or group of tracks), was to select those tracks and place the album artwork directly into those tracks (there were a couple of methods for doing this, but the point is that the artwork was added directly into the tracks' ID3 tags).
When displaying artwork in iTunes, it would read these tags in order to display the artwork.
To display artwork on the iPod, the artwork in the music file would be converted by iTunes into an album artwork database on the iPod itself. The iPod would ignore whatever image was in the tag, and simply read the uncompressed bitmap from it's artwork database.
This conversion process is done by iTunes, and only when the music file is transferred from iTunes to the iPod (automatically or manually). However, in automatic mode, the addition of the artwork into the tag would of course cause iTunes to see the file as updated, and therefore re-transfer it to the iPod, updating the album artwork in the process.
The one caveat here is that album artwork added directly to a track already on your iPod (via manual mode) would not be converted by iTunes for display on the iPod. The song file itself would need to be retransferred from your computer's iTunes library for the artwork to be converted properly.
So, enter iTunes 7....
Other than a bug in iTunes 7.0.0 (concerning adding artwork to MULTIPLE tracks simultaneously, which was fixed in 7.0.1), none of the behaviour from iTunes 6 has actually changed. Adding album artwork manually to your tracks works the same way that it always has.
However, what iTunes 7 now brings to the table is a feature to automatically fetch album artwork from the iTunes Store, primarily intended to supplement the coverflow browser feature so that there's artwork to look at within your library.
This automatic download of album artwork is where things start to fall apart. The problem is that iTunes does not place this downloaded artwork into your MP3/AAC files. In fact, it doesn't update the files at all -- rather it puts the artwork into a separate database that's maintained to support the coverflow feature.
Now, when viewing the track through iTunes, all indications will appear that the artwork is there and in place, but it's not actually IN your MP3/AAC file. iTunes is simply pulling it from it's own cache and displaying it in all the right places. When the track actually is transferred or updated on the iPod, iTunes will even correctly pull the album artwork from it's own cache, convert it for iPod viewing, and put it into the proper database.
However, because the file itself does not get updated when downloading artwork automatically, iTunes doesn't see that the file has changed and therefore won't see any reason to transfer any of that file's information to the iPod. Hence, the newly downloaded album artwork does not appear on the iPod until something else about that file changes.
However, if you add the artwork to your tracks the same way that you did in iTunes 6, everything will continue to work the way it's supposed to.
Alternatively, if you do want to use the automatic artwork downloading feature, and have a lot of tracks that require it, the simplest solution might be to just reload your album artwork onto your iPod from your iTunes library. To do this, simply DEselect "Display Album Artwork", sync your iPod, and then REselect that option. This will remove ALL album artwork from your iPod, and then force iTunes to rebuild the artwork database, retransferring all of your album artwork in the process, whether it's in the file tags themselves or in iTunes' own artwork cache."
http://forums.ilounge.com/showthread.php?t=175939