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Here are four ways that you can add artwork, with explanations as to the advantages and disadvantages of each. Note that I've ignored programs such as Clutter, which are a variation of the artwork collection and display approach. They are listed from the most recommended approach to the least.

Approach 1 - iTunes itself
iTunes 7 and above feature an option to import album artwork. This can be done on the basis of importing an entire library of songs artwork or on an individual song-by-song basis. The good thing is that if you have a number of songs from the same album in iTunes, it should figure this out and apply the same artwork to each song.

The advantage is that it can work through songs quite quickly and there is an easier way to change or remove artwork (right or control-click on a song and choose the option from a pop-up menu) making it easier to fix up mistakes. The disadvantage is if you have somehow manually added songs and their title and album cover names into iTunes, it may not find the right match.

Approach 2 - Widget search
The superb freeware dashboard widget Amazon Album Art Widget is specifically designed to try and track down album covers for you, usually offering many cover alternatives. If you see the right one, just click the widget to have it add the art to the current song playing in iTunes.

Approach 3 - Corripio
Corripio is a freeware/donationware program for fetching artwork and lyrics for songs from a number of sources. It is currently at version 0.7.2 which means the author still considers it under development and not worthy of being listed as Version 1. This is generally seen as acknowledgement that the software needs improving and you'll find that Corripio is a little buggy and there are some areas of the software that need improvement.

Using Corripio is very easy once you get the hang of it. Open up the application and it will load a list of your songs. You then select a song that you want to find the album artwork for (you can see an example in the image above) and then indicate how you want the program to search for a good match. In the example above, I've told it to search by album name for a Coldplay song.

Corripio has now searched for artwork and has shown me the various options that I have (in the example in the above, it's found the prefect match) so you just click on the image and click on the "Select" button. It will then assign that image to the song in iTunes.

But wait, if you've got a whole album in there, list them in order in Corripio, click the first song and then shift-click the last (in other words, select all the songs in that album) perform the search again and it will assign the artwork to all the songs.

Approach 4 - Search, drag and drop
The final suggestion is the most time consuming, but can solve the issue if the methods earlier can't find artwork for you. Go and find it yourself using your favourite search engine (such as Google)!

Then once you've saved the artwork image from a website to your Mac, start iTunes up, get the song playing (this is just the easiest way to indicate what song you are choosing in iTunes), from the "View" menu in iTunes make sure that "Show artwork" is selected and then drag the image file into the small window where the artwork is displayed.

In the example on the above, I've actually selected multiple songs that I want the same album image applied to.

Convinced you're not going to be able to find all that album art? Well one neat way to try and find as many matches as you can, is to upload your music list to this site (art4itunes.com) and get it to try and find the artwork for you. I was moderately pleased with the results.

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