The Cheezy Blog

I was playing around in iTunes today, adding album artwork to my songs, when I accidentally added the full-sized scan of a CD cover to an album (a 4MB JPEG) instead of the resized version. Now I wasn’t 100% sure where iTunes kept the images, a quick investigation showed no sign of them anywhere within ~/Music/iTunes nor anywhere in ~/Pictures, a quick google left me somewhat shocked.

It turns out iTunes doesn’t store the images seperately at all, rather it embeds it in the song itself, this is a valid part of the ID3 standard apparently, but it leads to huge songs, slow access and more importantly a WORLD of duplication. I would have expected it to store the images in the album’s directory, at least for albums that have been organised by iTunes itself, and maybe the option to scan a directory for images to use in the same directory as files being added from outside the iTunes music folder structure. This is the system used by most other music players, and avoids issues of duplication, saves space and is faster to use!