Trying to import albums into Music from an external ssd, but no artwork will show up.

Question

Level 1

4 points

Trying to import albums into Music from an external ssd, but no artwork will show up.

I've just gotten a mac mini M4 to replace my 2015 iMac and I'm trying to move the albums into the "Music" app. I'm using a Sandisc ssd and even though I can open the individual folders and see the artwork in the little thumbnails, when I drag an album in, no artwork comes with it. What's weird is it was always easy before. I'd drag in the albums and there's the art. What gives? I've looked all over the internet and no one seems to have this same problem.

I don't want to automatically download artwork from the apple cloud because I've spent almost two decades(!) assigning art to albums and many of them are Grateful Dead ticket stubs etc.

Mac mini, macOS 15.6

Posted on Sep 18, 2025 4:12 PM

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Answer 1

Sep 19, 2025 8:23 AM in response to Oldmansion

If you haven't signed in with your Apple ID then Music won't get artwork, and maybe they've got that restricted further to ignoring artwork in the music files?

If there's artwork associated with the folder on the SSD, then (I'm guessing) there must either be artwork in the individual music files or maybe a "folder.jpg" file in that same file with the MP3s or whatever music format you have. I just use the Get Info option on the imported album, then Add Artwork for the album and pick the folder.jpg. If the individual music files all have artwork (seen using Get Info on the individual songs), it should show up for the imported album. At least that was working in Sequoia - haven't imported anything in the past couple days since the Tahoe update.

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Answer 2

mjcm_nl

Level 3

717 points

Sep 21, 2025 6:25 PM in response to Oldmansion

I have the same issue.

what only works for me, up till now, is exporting the artwork and re-importing it in Music.app

I am using one of the dougscripts called re-embed artwork, it exports it and then imports it

(unfortunately only one song at the time it seems)

Don't know if I can post links, but Google "Dougscripts"

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Answer 3

Sep 21, 2025 6:52 PM in response to Oldmansion

I can't say why it's acting the way you're seeing. I use Kid3 to extract the embedded artwork, and if it's a decent size, I just to Get Info on the album, and then Add Artwork to pull the artwork in. It's possible the embedded artwork in those MP3s doesn't met some [Music] criteria - no idea.

I've got over 300 750x750 images I've created myself from online source that I've added after the switch back to manual sync and no cloud syncing. I'll see what happens when I import an album with this latest version of Music that's on Tahoe now, probably sometime in the coming week.

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Answer 4

Oldmansion Author

Level 1

4 points

Sep 21, 2025 6:29 PM in response to Still Fiddlin

Thanks for your response. I appreciate your time and effort and I'm still stuck.

I signed out and signed back in and nothing changed. It won't even show artwork for the two songs that I bought from the Apple cloud which seems weird to me.

Here's a screenshot of my Music app with and an open album folder...the art is clearly there. Why can't it see it?

Should I throw out the Music app and reinstall? Is it a glitch?

[Edited by Moderator]

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Answer 5

Oldmansion Author

Level 1

4 points

Sep 24, 2025 3:15 AM in response to Still Fiddlin

I also have created and sourced art for almost 7000 albums. It's worked well on all pervious Macs...My last one running Catalina and the post-iTunes Music app, so I'm not sure what's going on. I've created another internal music library just to see what's going on and downloaded one song from my purchased cloud account. Even then, it won't find or add artwork...

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