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User profile for user: gakushaburu
gakushaburu Author
User level: Level 1
133 points

What is the "Album Artwork" folder for iTunes 12?

It might sound like a silly question but I'm in the process of setting up a shared media folder for iTunes and so have been checking what is stored where. I don't understand what the "Album Artwork" is used for.


All the music in my library has artwork associated with it. I assume the artwork is added as metadata to the audio files as it shows up in Finder if I browse the media folder.


I'm using iTunes 12.9.5.5 on Mojave and 12.8.2.3 on El Capitan. Both have an "Album Artwork" folder but on El Capitan it has just a few empty subfolders. On Mojave it has more subfolders and a couple of them are populated (the "cache" and "remote" folders).


I stopped using artwork from Apple years ago and add jpg files locally.

iMac 27″, macOS 10.14

Posted on Dec 13, 2020 8:29 PM

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User profile for user: turingtest2
turingtest2
User level: Level 10
274,516 points

Posted on Dec 14, 2020 3:04 AM

The Album Artwork folder is a cache that iTunes creates and updates automatically. You don't need to do anything with it all, unless perhaps artwork isn't populating properly in the library in which case you can delete it and let iTunes rebuild it. It will contain many nested subfolders, some of which will contain .itc2 files. The Album Artwork folder lives in the same folder as the .itl library database and is not part of the media folder. See Make a split library portable - Apple Community for more background on the components of the library.


tt2

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User profile for user: turingtest2
turingtest2
User level: Level 10
274,516 points

Dec 14, 2020 3:04 AM in response to gakushaburu

The Album Artwork folder is a cache that iTunes creates and updates automatically. You don't need to do anything with it all, unless perhaps artwork isn't populating properly in the library in which case you can delete it and let iTunes rebuild it. It will contain many nested subfolders, some of which will contain .itc2 files. The Album Artwork folder lives in the same folder as the .itl library database and is not part of the media folder. See Make a split library portable - Apple Community for more background on the components of the library.


tt2

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User profile for user: gakushaburu
gakushaburu Author
User level: Level 1
133 points

Dec 14, 2020 3:56 PM in response to turingtest2

Thank you.

In fact I made a couple of mistakes in my original post.

I was in the process of moving my media folder to a NAS and referred to that because I was thinking of it, but as you say, the Album Artwork folder is not in it but in the default hierarchy is in the same parent folder.


Also I'd not remembered I'd moved iTunes on the older machine to the Shared user and the empty Album Artwork folder was in the default location and wasn't being used. Both iTunes had populated caches which makes more sense.

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What is the "Album Artwork" folder for iTunes 12?

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