If you’re like me, you want to add album artwork to iTunes songs. If you purchase your songs directly from the iTunes store, then you probably already have the album artwork for it, but what about all those other songs. You know the ones … you downloaded them from a file sharing site or your friends sent them to you by email. Or even the ones that you ripped from your CD collection.

If you look at your impressive media collection in iTunes, you’ll probably notice that a number of songs don’t have album artwork attached to them. So what? You might ask.

Well, it certainly isn’t going to affect playback or your listening pleasure, but when you’re listening to your iPod, being able to see the artist an album in an attractive picture, that can make the entire experience much more pleasant.

How Can You Get Album Artwork in iTunes?

There are two basic ways that you can add album artwork to iTunes in fix you library collection. The first way is manually. Go to the menu at the top of your screen and click on ‘Advanced’. Then scroll down until you see ‘Get Album Artwork.’ Sounds simple enough, right?

Sure, but there are a couple of things you should know about this process. First, when you select this, your iTunes library connects with the iTunes store. This exposes your entire list of songs to a major corporation that is helping the music industry crack down on file sharing, so if you don’t have certificates for the songs in your collection, there’s always the chance that it is reported (a thin chance, but there’s a warning that pops up when you do this, so you decide).

Second, if your song titles and other information is inaccurate or missing, you’re manual search for album artwork isn’t going to be effective. While you may get some new artwork, you’re not going to get it all and you’ll be back to missing those images that you’d like to have.

The other method is to use artworkforitunes.com. This site allows you to search for album artwork that might be available for your songs, but it also helps correct incorrect or missing information in your library.

Kill Two Birds …

With another tool, Rinse My Music, you get your entire music collection cleaned and organized in a way that makes it easy to find just what you want to listen to as well as all of the album artwork that is available on the Internet. If the artist didn’t provide any artwork for their album, then it’s not going to be available anywhere. But if it’s out there, then Rinse My Music will find it and download it for your collection.

What’s great about this program is that we tend to overlook the importance of having an organized playlist, but when it’s all cleaned up, you’ll wonder how you ever got along with it the way it was before.