I just went through my library and assigned every song an album art cover. I corrected some tags along the way, so I plugged in my iPod. iTunes ended up updating every single song except for 2. Why does iTunes update songs with new album art if I'm syncing to a non-photo iPod? How does iTunes store the art? Does it index them elsewhere in the Library folder or does it embed them in the music file itself? If it's the latter, I can see why it would udpate the songs, but I find it stupid because it can waste space on my iPod mini. I don't recall how much space I had beforehand, so I can't make a judgment on whether the album art made a huge difference (probably not), but has anyone else noticed this? How does iTunes store its album art?
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iTunes storing Album Art?
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The album art is stored in the MP3/AAC file. Since this alters the file and therefore file size iTunes probably just notices the file is different and therefore resyncs it to your iPod even though it cannot display the album art. I'm guessing the algorithm to re-sync just checks to see if the song file has been updated - if it has, it re-syncs. I added album art to my entire library and I it doesn't take up much space. I didn't cumulatively measure the size of my library before and after, but I did it on a few songs and in most cases it was only a few dozen KB.