Issues with wrong artwork or missing artwork on your iPhone? Deleted all your music and re-added only to see the problem get worse? Dreading a factory reset only to discover issue is still there? DON’T RESET!
Using this method you will have to manipulate some system files on the iPhone and also delete all your music from it.
I believe the issue lies within iTunes tagging/referencing of artwork in your iTunes library. You will need to MANUALLY assign artwork from now on instead of allowing iTunes to automatically lookup artwork (actually embedding the image to each mp3 file). This is key to solving this issue and preventing future occurrences. iTunes will lookup and download appropriate artwork; however, it will not physically add the artwork to your mp3 file. This is a set up for disaster when one mp3 cross reference leads to another mp3′s artwork due to differences in library databases…
Solution:
1. Plug in your iPhone and delete all music off your phone. Turn off auto sync music in iTunes (make sure to select “Manually manage music and videos”). Disconnect iPhone.
No auto sync…
Select to manage manually…
2. From within iTunes, CLEAR ALL iTunes assigned artwork from all non-iTunes purchased music. The easiest way to do this is to highlight every song in your library and right click and select “Clear Downloaded Artwork” (after this I would double check all the albums assigned by iTunes have been cleared).
Clearing downloaded artwork…
3. Exit out of iTunes.
4. Now we need to make sure iTunes will never be able to reference artwork from its personal database. On your computer, delete all the folders/files from path: /user/music/itunes/album artwork/
5. Download, install, and open iFunbox http://www.i-funbox.com/
6. Plug in iPhone. Make sure you’ve quit the Music App (hold home button and then exit out Music App). Open iFunbox and then open “Raw File System/iTunes_Control”
Raw file system…
iTunes_Control
7. Just in case, highlight every folder in this window (Artwork, Device, Music, etc) and select “Copy To Mac” in order to create a backup in case something goes awry.
8. Navigate to “iTunes_Control/Artwork” and delete “ArtworkDB.”
ArtworkDB…
9. Navigate back to “iTunes_Control” and now access “Music” and delete everything in this folder.
10. Now navigate to the “iTunes_Control/iTunes” folder–delete all the contents of “Artwork” (different folder from step 8).
Artwork folder contents…
11. Navigate to the “iTunes_Control/iTunes” folder and delete every file starting with Medialibrary.***
The culprits…
12. Exit out of everything, unplug your iPhone. Restart your iPhone by holding the power/hold and home button until you see the Apple logo.
13. Open iTunes and plug in your freshly restarted iPhone. At this point you should have no music on your iPhone. Since you’ve cleared all your downloaded album artwork, you’ll need to manually add artwork to your music (make sure the images are embedded into the file). Now manually add music to your iPhone. Launch your Music App. If the album art is correct you can manage your music however you want.
Voila! This should have solved the issue of corrupted album artwork! For future reference, DO NOT let iTunes lookup artwork for you–always manually add artwork yourself!
If this did not solve your artwork issue, please leave a reply (link at top) and let me know.
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THIS WORKED!!! FINALLY ALL MY ARTWORK IS FIXED!!! I have spent countless hours trying to fix this issue!
Thanks for this! I never had this problem until iOS 6. I tried other, similar solutions, but the problem always reoccurred.
FWIW, it didn’t work the first time. I followed the steps closely, but when I deleted all of the music on my iPhone, I didn’t delete the playlists. They were empty, of course, the names were still there. When the artwork got corrupted again, I followed all of your steps *and* deleted all of my playlists. It worked that time, and I’ve had no problems since.
Thanks again!
Dave,
Glad this helped. I’m curious as to why the playlists would have prevented the fix. How did you delete your music?
Doctor Chewy,
I am still having trouble adding album artwork to each song after the indicated procedure.
I have 5th gen. iPod touch recently updated to the newest firmware (iOS 6.1.3) along with itunes (11.0.2.26)
Things started to act after the update, and now I have nothing but “music note” artwork to each song.
I can add artwork to itunes and it shows, but just not on the iPod screen. This is really killing me…
I have even deleted my whole library and still wouldn’t work.
PLEASE HELP!
Did you make sure to delete the medialibrary.*** files and restart your ipod/music app? This should force your touch to rebuild it’s library and fix the issue.
This was great, thanks! I fixed my seemingly never-ending album artwork problems!
I looked a very long time online for some answeres trying this “solution” and that “solution” to no avail and getting pretty frustrated in the process. Finally, I came across your soulution…and it worked! Until…the next morning when I booted up by PC. iTunes would not load saying that it was missing files to do so. I have deleted iTunes and am in the process of reloading. I hoping that this will work and that all the previous artwork that was causing the problem will remain gone since it worked so well with your method.
(I’m using the latest version of iOS6 and have an iPhone 5)
Thanks,
Randy
Glad This helped. The iTunes issue is odd… You only deleted the downloaded artwork folder and nothing else? Let me know what you find!
Ive been searching for days now and this seems to be the best fix. However, im not sure what went wrong but I didn’t back up and now my iPhone shows no album art at all. Any ideas
Does correct artwork show up in your iTunes (on your computer)?
Yes it does, I seem to have solved the problem by simply re-doing the steps above. I also deleted everything in the Sync/Media folder. Thanks so much!
OMG,.Im so thankful to you,.. this problem has got the hell out of me for sometime as i really care bout albumart and stuffs which makes my iphone music look cool,..Im using an IPhone 5 and this problem started just after i tried to get album art through i tunes,..i ws searchin for something like this and finally got it,.. Thank You very much for this tutorial n introducing me to iFunbox, CHEERS,.!!
My music library has over 80,000 songs, most of them with manually-added (sometimes custom) artwork. This process above… wouldn’t it mean having to locate and re-install artwork to each of those albums? [Nearly all of my artwork was added through Info/Artwork, not using Apple services. My iphone currently displays the correct artwork most of the time, but too often lately the artwork is missing or the wrong artwork is showing on my iPhone.] Thanks!
Yes, you would need to reinstall all your music again. The reason more and more songs are showing the wrong info/artwork is due to a corrupted database. If you “reset” the database you will have to reinstall your music as well. I wish it were easier but this is the only way I’ve been able to successfully resolve the issue and prevent it from reoccurring.