Album art - need the straight skinny.

[SaxBlaCussionIzer]

I've got THOUSANDS of cds in Subsonic and album artwork only shows on a few them. I'm looking to understand the rhyme/reason of the situation and get the art that i don't have. I'm assuming that this cover art might be in the album metadata somewhere but i don't know. I see lots of references to the fact that Subsonic supports album art, etc. i just don't see it in practice on my media server.

So, a few questions for anyone who's got a bead on this:
1. What governs whether or not a CD's artwork displays when i navigate to that CD in the browser?
2. If a CD is not showing album artwork, do i have any way of adding it?
3. If i do have a way of manually adding it, can i do this in some sort of 'batch mode'? I've got THOUSANDS of cd's, adding them one-by-one would be an arduous process.

thanx and cheers!
jim.

[acroyear]

My impression (not having looked at the code) - in priority order:

If there is a "cover.*" file (png, jpeg, jpg), it is used.
If there is a "folder.*" file (png, jpeg, jpg), it is used.
If there is album artwork embedded in the *first* file in the folder (by track ID or alpha-numeric), it is used.
If there is any file with a png, jpeg, jpg suffix, it is used.

I may be wrong about the order of the last two (in other words, any image file in the folder overrides the artwork within the mp3).

Folders that don't have mp3 files do not render artwork directly (though it may attempt to treat the folder, or a parent folder, as the 'artist' and render that instead, but you can't override what it finds).

The online way of loading art from last.fm is only one folder at a time. The older Google image search was removed because Google removed that public API.

The only other way to set artwork is to basically put the image files into each folder yourself, or use a 3rd party tool that can automatically find the artwork and embed it into the mp3 files directly. After that, though, you may need to rescan your media folders.

[toolman]

Allthough I agree on the most part of your answer, I would like to warn you. Using 3rd party tools doesn't go well with Subsonic. You'll end up with a database that is not consistent with the tags or coverart of your media collection. Believe me, I went down that road and have lived to regret it. The only way out of that is to disable all media folders, scan, clean up database, enable mediafolders and scan again. Sometimes you even have to remove your entire Subsonic installation, delete all remains of Subsonic and start a new and fresh installation from scratch. Which is annoying because you loose all starratings, comments, users and statistics.