[ClausTheDane]

I keep all music files on an external harddrive and after a recent re-install of my MacBook Pro the re-syncronization with iTunes went smoothly - apart from one thing: all cover art had to be downloaded all over. I have now gone through a rather tedious task of locating and attaching all missing cover art for various albums and now I want to make sure that if I have to go through the re-install routine again I'm not loosing all this work. Does anybody know where iTunes store the cover art? Or does anybody know what I have to do to make sure I backup all these files?

[mdawson]

iTunes stores album images in one of two ways depending on how you add cover art to your library. Until the release of iTunes 7, album artwork was strictly stored in each music data file. Thus, when you added artwork to tracks in iTunes 1 thru 6, the artwork was stored as a tag in the actual music file stored on your hard drive. iTunes still stores album artwork in this way if you add the artwork by any means other than downloading from the iTunes Store. Therefore, such music files will always have cover art associated with them unless the actual file has somehow become corrupted.

When Apple introduced CoverFlow in iTunes 7, they needed to include a separate artwork database for CoverFlow as well as general image management. Thus, in iTunes 7 and 8, an Album Artwork folder is included in the iTunes folder. As the purpose of the artwork database is to primarily support CoverFlow, the image files in that folder are not standard image files, nor are they named in a manner that makes it easy for you to find the cover for a given album. The Album Artwork database was designed as a component of the iTunes application structure that is not accessed by iTunes users.

The Album Artwork folder is populated regardless of how you add artwork to your tracks. For instance, all of my music currently in iTunes is ripped from my CD collection and the artwork was all scanned and copied into iTunes. Therefore, all of my cover art is embedded in the 13,500+ music files on my hard drive. That aside, my Album Artwork folder is not empty even though I never download music or cover art.

The problem is that as of iTunes 7, if you download music from the iTunes Store or use iTunes to capture artwork for your library, the cover art is no longer embedded in the music files. As such, if you do not properly migrate your iTunes folder with the Album Artwork folder intact, you lose all of your artwork. So, if you need to re-install the operating system, or iTunes, you should be sure to backup your iTunes folder (in toto) then recover it afterward.