I’ve been spending a lot of time and effort cleaning up my iTunes library, correcting errors in metadata and filling in missing info, and I’ve run the Store > Get Album Artwork command a few times to get album covers from the iTunes Store, but doing so takes a while because it scans my whole library each time. Can I limit how much of the library it’s scanning? Any other tips for finding missing album artwork?

You can search à la carte. Get started viewing your album artwork next to your track list, which is the second view button, or View > As Album List. By default, it only displays artwork for albums you have five or more songs from, but just select View > Always Show Artwork and you’ll see the artwork for everything.

Right-click an album's missing artwork to confine the search to just that album.

Now instead of using the Store > Get Album Artwork feature to scan your entire iTunes library at once, just right-click the “missing artwork” box and select Get Album Artwork from the contextual menu. That searches for just the one album, so it’s a big time-saver when you’ve just fixed an album’s metadata to make it findable, but you don’t want to run the Get Album Artwork routine on your whole library.

The Amazon Album Art widget can search Amazon's database for your album covers and add them to iTunes for you.

But iTunes’ built-in artwork search isn’t the best, anyhow. If you really want your library to be complete, consider trying some other art-fetching utilities, like the Amazon Album Art widget (free, widget-foundry.com) or CoverScout ($39.95, equinux.com), which is pricey but thorough, offering you multiple options for even the most obscure cover-less albums and letting you tweak the colors and borders just the way you like.

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