How to find album art for your iPod

Sick of seeing grey squares parading across your iPod? We show you how to find album art -- the easy way.

One of the coolest aspects of the iPod Touch, Classic and latest-gen nano is the ability to browse your music collection in Cover Flow mode. Unfortunately, if you haven't added cover artwork to your music in iTunes, then Cover Flow is just a depressing parade of generic blank boxes. Don't despair! Adding artwork in iTunes is easier than ever and can actually be somewhat fun.

Step 1: Try getting album art automatically
The most recent versions of iTunes have a built-in feature that will automatically try and match your music collection with album artwork. This is achieved by matching the data from your music library with albums available in the iTunes store.

Make iTunes do the work for you

This feature is seldom 100 percent effective -- especially given popular artists such as The Beatles are absent from the iTunes sales catalogue -- but it will get you closer to your goal. To use it, open up iTunes and immediately go to the Advanced menu and select "Get Album Artwork" (see right). You will need to be signed in to your iTunes account.

iTunes will now compare your music library against its online album art database and see if it can find any matches. Depending on how much music you have, this step could take a few minutes.

Step 2: Filling in the gaps
After completing the first step, iTunes has hopefully matched most of your music collection with artwork. Unfortunately, once you get hooked on seeing your music in Cover Flow, it's tough to tolerate missing artwork for even a single album. So let's find the stragglers.

First, select your music library and switch your iTunes view to the second of the three options (option one is a list view, option three is Cover Flow, and option two is a compromise between the two). This view allows you to see a list of your music alongside any cover artwork that is attached to it. It's not as gee-whiz as Cover Flow, but it's much more practical for this job. At this point you should be able to scroll though your list and see which songs have cover artwork and which ones don't. If all of your songs have artwork, then congratulations -- just sync your iPod and eject it.

If you've found a song or album that is still missing cover artwork, iTunes gives you multiple ways to remedy the problem. One of the easiest methods is to make sure your iTunes Now Playing pane is open in the lower-left corner of the application. If you don't see this square, you can go to the View menu and select "View Artwork", or you can click on the rightmost of the four buttons found on the lower-left corner of the application window (the button that looks like a triangle with a square around it).

Drag and drop images to the Now Playing pane

If a track is playing that currently has album artwork, then the Now Playing pane will display the artwork. If the track does not have any artwork associated with it, then iTunes will give you the option of dragging and dropping the artwork directly into the Now Playing pane (see picture right).

Another option is to right-click on the song that needs artwork and select "Get Info". You'll see a pop-up window filled with multiple tabs of information about this song. The last tab is marked "Artwork" and it allows you to drag and drop image files into the window and even resize the image.

Yet a third option is to select multiple songs (all the songs in an album, for instance) and apply one artwork image to multiple songs at once. To accomplish this, select multiple songs by holding down the shift key, then right-click to select "Get Info." You should see a Multiple Item Information window, with a big square on the right side for album artwork. Again, just drag and drop artwork right onto the box, then hit OK.

Step 3: Finding artwork online
The easiest way to find the rest of your album images is to visit a site that will find them for you. Free services such as Art4itunes.com will match album covers from Amazon.com to your entire song list. All you need to do is export your iTunes library as a plain text file (select all songs, then click Export in the File menu), and upload it to the site.

Upload your songlist and Art4itunes.com will find the album covers.

If your monitor can accommodate running iTunes and your Web browser side by side, you can actually drag and drop artwork straight from the browser and into the iTunes Now Playing pane without having to mess with saving files to your desktop.

Other Web methods include conducting a basic Google Image search and trawling the archives of Discogs.com. If you've got some odd audio in your library (home recordings, voice memos, digitised mix tapes), you can have a lot of fun finding images online to stand in for cover art.

Step 4: Sync and eject
Connect your iPod to your computer and sync it to your new, visually stunning music library. Enjoy.

Ella Morton contributed to this feature.