When I updated my iMac to Catalina yesterday, I watched as the Music app slowly display album artwork. I have about 4,000 albums in my library – this is all local music, I don’t use Cloud Music Library on this Mac – and it took a couple of hours for the Music app to go through all the files and display the artwork.

Folder Album Artwork For Mac

But I couldn’t find where it was stored. In the past, there was an Album Artwork folder in the /Music/iTunes folder in the home folder. While that folder is still there – and isn’t needed any more – artwork is now stored in a different location.

But I couldn’t find it at first. I was looking for a folder around the same size; my Album Artwork folder was always around 4-5 GB. The new path for artwork is:

Artwork
  • ITunes/iPod work very nicely with embedded album art but don’t support folder album art. With the size of my collection, the embedded album art does end up taking a not-insignificant chunk of storage space (30kB/file), but the folder album art, being typically only 30kB / 10-20 files is not quite as bad so it’s really a no-brainer.
  • You can add cover art manually with the applications listed below, or some control points simply need a folder.jpg or cover.jpg to be present in the same folder as the tracks. JRiver (a Windows and Mac music player (also more information about artwork within jriver can be found here ).

Folder Album Artwork For Mac Os

~/Library/Containers/com.apple.APMArtworkAgent/Data/Documents

Free

Oct 10, 2019 In the past, there was an Album Artwork folder in the /Music/iTunes folder in the home folder. While that folder is still there – and isn’t needed any more – artwork is now stored in a different location. But I couldn’t find it at first. I was looking for a folder around the same size; my Album Artwork folder was always around 4-5 GB.

Windows 10 album folderMac

Folder Album Artwork For Mac Computers

For me, this folder is less than 1 GB, which is why I couldn’t find it previously. Interestingly, this folder no longer contains files with the extension .itc, which only a few apps could read, but the files are now the original .png or .jpg files that I added to my music files (or that came with purchases from the iTunes Store).

Album Artwork Creator

Learn more about the new media apps that replace iTunes in macOS Catalina in my new book, Take Control of macOS Media Apps.