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iTunes saves Album Artwork to ~/Music/iTunes/Album/Artwork/Cache/[some seemingly random folder name here]/

The problem is that if I move actual MP3 and AAC files from this computer (and/or iTunes database) to another one, I (assume that I) will lose the connection between those songs and the cached artwork.

Right now there is 826 MB worth of of cached images in 950+ files.

I am almost certain that it is possible to add album art directly to the media files, but I need a solution which can be automated (at least most of it) because I really don't want to do this 950+ times, and I have a lot more music to clean up in the future.

Footnotes:

  1. [Non-free solutions are entirely welcome, but please let me know if your proposed solution isn't free, and how much it costs, if you know.]

  2. I have both MP3 and AAC files, so hopefully any solution will work on either kind of files.

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  • install exiftool. The man page tells how to extract embedded images from a file. Do that with a couple of music files, and I suspect you'll find that they already have their artwork embedded. Or add an audio file, then add artwork, and see whether its size changes.
    – WGroleau
    Commented Feb 9, 2018 at 15:09

2 Answers 2

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Check out this AppleScript from the excellent dougscripts.com: Re-Embed Artwork v.1.0. If that doesn't do it for you, you may find something else useful on that site.

Note: I haven't run this script myself and can't vouch for its efficacy, though I believe its source is well-regarded. Use at your own risk.

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  • Now that you mention it, I think I may have used that in the past. [And yes, DougScripts are excellent.] I actually thought it was a built-in feature of iTunes until I couldn't find it. But I still wonder if there are any other methods available.
    – TJ Luoma
    Commented Oct 18, 2011 at 6:26
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I've been using the free command line tool AtomicParsley. It really works fantastically well, and I've been able to embed multiple artworks into .m4a files without issue. It does them in sequence, so you'll want to use --artwork REMOVE_ALL as the first argument, followed by the primary image, then secondary images in the order you want them.

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