I cannot find the folder with album artwork that I had to manually download and copy from the internet. Where did iTunes hide it?

Question

There were many albums I loaded from my personal CD collection onto my computer’s iTunes library because the software was not able to download them. So, I went to the Internet and downloaded each album artwork, piece by piece as I needed it and then imported the artwork into iTunes album in my library and now all albums have artwork cover. The files were saved in a folder in my computer called: Album Artwork. The artwork is still showing for my music files in iTunes but I cannot file the folder where all these files are stored. The problem is that when I find another album that iTunes cannot get the artwork for me or loads the wrong artwork, I want to download it from the Internet and save it on my computer. Where can I save the file on my computer so it won’t get hidden by iTunes in the future?

Please help me!

Answer 1

iTunes saves all the artwork in ITC file format. It's something like JPEG but with few extra bytes in the header of the file. To be able to properly extract the images you will have to use a hex editor and delete parts of the header which is something rather difficult.

It seems that you can't do nothing about those files because it involves manual editing of each file, and if you have 100-200 files, for example, it could take very much time to complete this. Simply download the artwork and keep it in a folder but don't add it to iTunes.

On the other hand, all the artwork is stored in the iTunes install location under the Album Artwork folder.

Comments

Yes, when you import JPG files into iTunes, it converts them to ITC format.

Answer 2

I haven't found any .png artwork files yet. But if you open a .itc file in a good editor, and near the top (the exact position varies), it says "data" then 6 more characters and "JFIF", it's a modified .jpg file.

Copy the .itc file somewhere else. Then open the copy in your editor, and carefully delete everything from the beginning, up to and including "data", but nothing else. (Leave the 6 characters before "JFIF" alone.)

Save the file, and give it a .jpg extension. There is your art.

Answer 3

Im using Windows Media along with tuneup companion. where are albums pictures stored. I Cant Find Them