How much space does album art use?
I'm contemplating adding album artwork to my iPod photo, but with 5,000+ songs, I'm wondering roughly how much space that would take up before I do it.
I did a little experiment and added album art for 30 songs (3 different images), which took up almost 0.1 GB. That seemed a lot. By that calculation, I'd use an entire gig for every 300 songs, or 10 gigs for 3,000 songs. That seems extraordinarily high.
It would be cool to have the images loaded, but not if they eat up a lot of space. I need the gigs for music more than I need them for small album covers.
Anyone know if album art is a space hog or not?
Thanks.
--Lena
[685 byte] By [
lena] at [2007-11-10 4:55:57]
# 1 Re: How much space does album art use?
I have noticed that it takes up about 100kB a song.
swy32x at 2007-11-15 13:12:44 >
# 2 Re: How much space does album art use?
there NO way artwork for 30 songs used 100 MB. I just added a large, high-res piece of artwork to a playlist with 62 songs totalling 454 MB. It went up to 461.5 MB That's about 0.12 MB per song.
# 3 Re: How much space does album art use?
Thanks Snowy and Crzy,
Yes, that sounds about right, but for some reason my 30 took up a lot. Out of curiosity, how are you adding your artwork?
--L
lena at 2007-11-15 13:14:54 >
# 4 Re: How much space does album art use?
I just drag it out of Safari onto the artwork well in iTunes.
# 5 Re: How much space does album art use?
Interesting. I was able to do that, but only with one song at a time. If I selected multiple songs, I could not add artwork. Thus, I'm wondering if iTunes wasn't adding the same image over and over in some weird way. Do you just select more than one track in iTunes and drag and drop? for some reason, that didn't work for me.
lena at 2007-11-15 13:16:48 >
# 6 Re: How much space does album art use?
You can add artwork to multiple songs in itunes by selecting the songs, then right clicking and choosing 'get info'. You can then edit any of the ID3 tags (except title, including artwork) which will then propogate to all the selected songs.
Adding the same artwork to multiple songs will replicate that artwork for each one though (so you will see a file size increase on every song approximately equal to the size of the artwork).
Rudis at 2007-11-15 13:17:47 >
# 7 Re: How much space does album art use?
Using "Clutter" works great for Macs.
# 8 Re: How much space does album art use?
Originally posted by lena
Interesting. I was able to do that, but only with one song at a time. If I selected multiple songs, I could not add artwork. Thus, I'm wondering if iTunes wasn't adding the same image over and over in some weird way.
I was making the same mistake and ended up adding multiple album covers in each song. TO check this out, right-click (CTRL-click) on a song you suspect and choose the ARTWORK tab. You should only see one cover. You may see multiple ones like me.
I guess this feature is useful if you want to scan the whole booklet and place in the song file...
# 9 Re: How much space does album art use?
is there a way to view more than one album art per song? I know there is a way to view more than one item in itunes.. just wondering if there is an option in the ipod.
# 10 Re: How much space does album art use?
Originally posted by jdestrada
is there a way to view more than one album art per song?
Only in iTunes but not in iPod.
# 11 Re: How much space does album art use?
Getting back to the original question, for a moment, I have approximately 200 albums on my iPod with album artwork. If you assume that the average number of tracks per album is about 12, then I guess that would make up about 2,400 tracks containing album artwork.
The artwork thumbnails database on my iPod is taking up about 133Mb.
(FYI, if you want to see how much space the album artwork is actually taking up, put your iPod in disk mode, and look in the \iPod_Control\Artwork directory. These files are your album artwork as stored on your iPod by iTunes. However, this would not include the space that the artwork is taking up within the MP3/AAC files themselves).
