Putting aside the use of the word "artist" to refer to someone who doesn't paint or sculpt...

I wondered if there was a way to add images to missing artist pictures in itunes 12.8.

Maybe there needs to a program, an itunes assistant, for all those tweaks you want to make on your library.

People have complained about itunes going downhill. It's not that bad, really, though it is difficult to find the right prefs for what you want to do. Lots of hide and seek. Altogether too much needless fiddling. But the library organization is still better than other programs I've tried. Better than earlier versions of itunes, where I found it quite easy to screw up my library while trying to improve it, find files, delete duplicates, and so on. The innards got better while the outer got worse.

You get some nice features in JRiver and Clementine. Amarra gives you few options and bombards you TIDAL everywhere in its dark mode interface. But where's my library? Similarly, when you start Fidelia, you get that nice graphic of a stereo with a big knob you can't turn. But where's my library? Clementine does a much better job of revealing your library and give you a lot of features, which is odd given that it's open source and free. It's a much more intuitive program than many others. The font handling in JRiver is terrible. I was surprised to see that the Mac version appears to be inferior to a version I ran on Windows 7.

Is Cover art in iTunes what you're loking for?

Artist pictures, not album covers.

That's why I posed my response as a question.

I've followed MacTracker every day for years, and I"ve never seen an app that specifically fetches artist pics; I imagine that it's a job for Google Images.

Can you actually insert artist pics where album covers would normally go?

No. I found this

https://www.macworld.com/article/3140018...houldnt-be.html

You might try calling or texting Apple support. It appears iTunes selects the artist's "image" from the first album in the Library by that artist.

Granted that it probably involves much work, but doesn't the procedure spelled out in my previously linked Macworld UK article turn the trick for you?

That's for album covers.

"I've followed MacTracker every day for years"

What's MacTracker? You mean MacUpdate?

Yes, but the artist's image is extracted from the album covers. So if you replace the album cover image that should change the artist's image (at least that is the way my rationale seems to lead)

Mactracker

and the app is available from the App Store as well as MacUpdate.com, but I don't know that is what Artie was referring to.

Although the instructions are specifically directed at album covers, their general nature, i.e. "it is possible to manually add artwork to iTunes", tells me that they can be used to insert any image at all into a song's cover slot; iTunes hasn't got a clue whether the pic you add fits the parameters of the slot into which you put it.

Example

Example 2

And yeah, I meant MacUpdate. Sorry for the confusion.

The easy way...

• Locate the artwork you want to insert for a particular song.
• Copy it to your clipboard.
• Select the song in iTunes.
• Hit command-I.
• Click on the image box in the upper left hand corner. (It will become highlighted in blue.)
• Hit command-V.
• Your image will be inserted.

And if there's another iTunes location into which artist pics can be inserted, neither I nor Google can locate it.

even if you don't want the artist's image to BE the cover art, you can still add it. songs can have more than one image and you can select which one you want to use as the cover iirc. it probably just inserts the image as metadata into the picture.

Open itunes
In the upper left column drop-down menu select Music
In the left column select Artists
To the right of playlists there's a list of "artists" whose albums you have
Those are the pictures I'm talking about.

If you right click one of those and choose Artist Info, you get an album cover. You don't get the artist picture.

I don't see "Artists" in my left column. Have I got the right left column? (iTunes 12.9.0.164)

Unless the album covers iTunes gives you as "Artist Info" are other images than those in Song > Get Info > Artwork they can be deleted and replaced with whatever images you prefer.

Are they the same images, or are they different ones (that iTunes presumably fetches on the fly)?

And don't forget that it may all boil down to iTunes working from an understanding of "Artist Info" that differs from yours; I can very easily see album covers qualifying as artist info.

I'd like to see a screenshot or two of what you're seeing so I can maybe duplicate your experience. (Just in case: To post a screenshot...

1. Go to https://imgur.com/upload.
2. Either drag your screenshot into the window or browse for it.
3. Click on "Copy" in the next window to copy your screenshot's URL to your clipboard.
4. Create a link using FTM's "Create a link..." tags...2nd icon from the left.)

Artie I had never seen deniro's view either and it took me over 15 minutes of switching settings to get to the view deniro is using but it required several steps...

• Press ⌘j to pop up the View options menu
• On the View options menu select "List"
• At the far left end of the iTunes Tool Bar there is a drop down menu with the options Music, Movies, TV Shows, Podcasts, & AuduibBooks — select Music
• When Music is selected on the to0l bar then at the top of the sidebar you will see the the word "Library" and under that Recently Added, Artists, Albums, Songs, Genres, Music Videos, and Downloaded. Select "Artists".

I was going to post a picture, but it was going to take a video to go through all the steps to get there.

Got me beat!

I don't see "List" view as an option, but I seem to be in it anyhow...and "Artists" is nowhere to be found.

I checked and unchecked every box in iTunes prefs that sounded like a possibility, but with no joy.



Hmmm... I wonder if my "problem" is that I"ve never bought any music from the iTunes Store?

Artist view

I was going to video this, but Screen capture was acting up in my beta version of MacOS 10.14.1 so you will have to settle for stills. Getting to this is tricky as the contents of the various menus change with every change and it is not always easy getting back to your starting point much less a new settings. in the accompanying screenshots, I began with my normal default where Albums are selected in library and the View is “Grid”. Screenshot 1.

Then press Command+J to bring up the View menu (the contents of this menu are different for each of the media types listed under Library. Screenshot 2 .

Select “List” on the View menu and notice how the view has changed. Screenshot 3

As the final step in the sidebar under Library select Artist Screenshot 4

Don't ask how I found the proper screen, there was no science or organization involved, just dogged hunt and peck. 🤷‍♂️

Thanks for the screenshot; knowing what I was dealing with was helpful.

Researching this one was more difficult than trying to catch a greased pig, because questioning Google about "artist pictures" invariably returned a whole passel of hits about "album art", but I was able to glean some info from the few sources that came up (none of which seemed particularly authoritative on its surface):

• Through iTunes 12.5, "Artists" was fully populated with pics.
• In more recent versions, many artist pics have been replaced by generic mikes.
• There doesn't appear to be any correlation between the mikes and the source of the music, i.e. iTunes Store or manually imported.
• The pics come directly from Apple, and there's apparently no way for users to manipulate them in any way.

Thanks for going the distance, but no luck.

Neither my classical library sidebar nor that of my non-classical library shows "Artists", which, for lack of anything else to blame, I'll attribute to my never having purchased music from the iTunes Music Store; I'll also attribute the other elements that appear on your screen but are missing from mine to the same thing.

My classical library sidebar doesn't show "Albums", but my non-classical library sidebar does, and I've got no idea why.