One of the most eye-catching features in Apple’s iPhone and iPod Touch is the implementation of Cover Flow, the iTunes file user interface that enables you to browse the music library by simply flipping album covers. It really looks nice both on your computer and your device… that is, provided you have all the covers for your music collection, because as soon as there are some of them missing, Cover Flow suddenly loses all of its attractive.
Luckily for you, finding those lost album covers is quite easy. I’m sure there a few ways to retrieve them, but I’ll explain a couple of tricks I’ve used on my personal music library and have worked fine for me. The first one requires an iTunes Store account, which you can create straight from iTunes. Once you’re logged in, all you have to do is right click on the file you want to search the album cover for and select the Get Album Artwork option. iTunes will find and download the cover for you, as long as the file’s tags are properly filled in.
If you don’t have an iTunes account and don’t want to create one, here’s a detour for you: it’s called Album Art Downloader and it’s a free tool that searches multiple album cover databases at the same time using the keywords you provide in the Album or Artist fields. Album Art Downloader lets you preview covers in full size and save them to your hard drive with a single click.
