I manually sync my music to my iPhone. I synced it all back and the album art is off on my phone but not on “music” on ny mac.
Anyone else have this issue?
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Album art not syncing?
- Thread starter michael31986
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Yes. Not sure whether it’s an iOS26 problem or a macOS26 problem (or both). I also manually sync all my music (on an MBP M1) to my iPhone. When I got my new 17PM, it copied over all the music (400+GB!) from my 14PM without issue, and it played fine in my car with CarPlay. But, when I plugged my new phone into my MBP (updated to macOS 26) just now and tried to add new music to it, nothing happened. I then discovered that all the music on my new phone was GONE. Not a huge problem, I thought—I could just start over and add music manually again. But, with the first few albums I added, all had the wrong cover art (from other albums in my collection). WTF, Apple???
UPDATE: I restarted my phone and the MBP hoping that whatever garbage in the cache would be cleared. Tried copying over several albums, and this time about 2/3 of them were fine. I deleted the bad ones and then re-added them one-by-one, which worked out just fine.
Well, after updating my 17PM and MBP M1 to 26.0.1, this issue is still not fixed. I just synced 2 albums to my phone and both showed the incorrect album art on the phone. 😡
Same issue. I went through a call with support and they had me create a new user on my Mac. With the new user the issue wasn't happening. I wasn't willing to go through the pain of migrating to a new user ID with no guarantee that this just wouldn't happen again.
Not fixed with iOS 26.2 beta 2. I added this info to my original feedback item.
I can confirm the same. I had performed a sync from iTunes to my iPhone 14 Pro Max running iOS 26.2 beta 2 per a new CD I had just ripped and worked over in Mp3tag as I normally do, high quality cover art having been embedded to each song. The album artwork would not show up on my iPhone. No issues within iTunes of course. Naturally I didn't take a couple minutes and go online to see if the issue was perhaps related to iOS 26.2 beta 2. Foolishly wiped out the songs on my iPhone removing the "Album Artwork/cache" folder for good measure prior to restarting my iPhone and Windows 11. Performed a fresh sync (10,291 songs) from iTunes and now zero cover art is being shown on my iPhone.
I just updated, and still no artwork, but I haven’t re-synced my phone since updating.
Same. Well, I did perform a sync in iTunes after updating iOS. On Step 4 of 4 it stated, "Syncing Artwork..." but still no dice. Restarted my iPhone for good measure. Still no dice. Turned "Sync Music" off in iTunes performing another sync removing all music from my iPhone. Turned "Sync Music (Entire music library)" back on syncing again. Looks like that did the trick. The artwork is showing up now for all songs (2605 of 10303) synced so far. 👍
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Hey, I’m in the same situation and found this thread. Not currently using any of the betas however.
I used to be able to fix this manually by re-syncing. I was able to delete the songs from my music library on my iPhone, and then re-sync to fix the art. Sometimes it would take a few tries.
But the other day, as I imported a lot of music and synced, it started messing up the album art (song art was fine) and wouldn’t fix itself. I was able to fix it for most albums through multiple re-syncs, but not three specific ones, for whatever reason. These were even using imported album art for songs I long deleted off my iTunes and iPhone music library. iTunes/Apple purchased music was fine for me—of course it was only the music I imported myself that were having this issue.
I tried multiple things such as deleting the music app on my phone, deleting the artwork folder of iTunes on my mac to force it to recompile, restarting my phone, and I even de-synced the music and re-synced 800+ songs again. But nothing worked for these specific album arts.
Today, I was about to try and contact Apple as a last resort, but decided to mess around with the album info itself because I assume it’s some kind of code issue. And I managed to find a workaround! I edited the album names of the ones that were messing up, and just added a single space (“ “) after the names, then re-synced, and the correct album art shows up on my iPhone. I’ve no idea why this seems to work, my guess is a cacheing issue when figuring out what album art to use, as others have pointed out.
However—in a few albums, the art was showing up blank on my phone after adding in the space, but I found that simply copy and pasting the image from the “Get Info” menu in iTunes when right clicking the album (or pasting a new image altogether if you need to) fixes this.
It might be a pain to do if you have a lot of music. But hopefully this might work for some of you!
For reference, I’m on macOS 26.1 and iOS 26.1
I used to be able to fix this manually by re-syncing. I was able to delete the songs from my music library on my iPhone, and then re-sync to fix the art. Sometimes it would take a few tries.
But the other day, as I imported a lot of music and synced, it started messing up the album art (song art was fine) and wouldn’t fix itself. I was able to fix it for most albums through multiple re-syncs, but not three specific ones, for whatever reason. These were even using imported album art for songs I long deleted off my iTunes and iPhone music library. iTunes/Apple purchased music was fine for me—of course it was only the music I imported myself that were having this issue.
I tried multiple things such as deleting the music app on my phone, deleting the artwork folder of iTunes on my mac to force it to recompile, restarting my phone, and I even de-synced the music and re-synced 800+ songs again. But nothing worked for these specific album arts.
Today, I was about to try and contact Apple as a last resort, but decided to mess around with the album info itself because I assume it’s some kind of code issue. And I managed to find a workaround! I edited the album names of the ones that were messing up, and just added a single space (“ “) after the names, then re-synced, and the correct album art shows up on my iPhone. I’ve no idea why this seems to work, my guess is a cacheing issue when figuring out what album art to use, as others have pointed out.
However—in a few albums, the art was showing up blank on my phone after adding in the space, but I found that simply copy and pasting the image from the “Get Info” menu in iTunes when right clicking the album (or pasting a new image altogether if you need to) fixes this.
It might be a pain to do if you have a lot of music. But hopefully this might work for some of you!
For reference, I’m on macOS 26.1 and iOS 26.1
I’m so sorry! Sounds like you have applied all the possible solutions to force resync the artwork. This thread was specific to a beta, but maybe your issue will be resolved when the new iOS 26.2 official release comes out, probably this week. Good luck, and please let us know.🙏🏻
I'm waiting to update to iOS 26.2 I'm still on iOS 18, and worry a lot about having issues with my local files and album arts.
and iOS 26.2 just released publicly, is it for sure fixed the issues with Apple Music changing album covers to local files? Because I'd hate having my local files ruined.
i am subscribed but don't have library syncing and don't download the stream songs, I only transfer my local files to iPhone from Mac on Finder / AM. So after 26.2 the custom album art on local files isn't changing to the Apple Music ones?