Reduce album art size in iTunes?

[ramparts]

Because iTunes embeds album art directly in the files, I'm realizing there's a problem:

1) I've probably added quite a few large (500 kb+) image files as album art without thinking much about it over the years, when such high resolution isn't really important for much of anything. This means I'm using a lot of extra space - maybe even upward of a GB - on needlessly large album art.

2) I don't know of any simple way to check how large the album art embedded in a given MP3 is. If there is a way, you could just go through your music library, find the albums with very large art, and replace it with something more reasonable from the internet.

Does anyone know of good solutions to this problem, i.e., reducing the size of album art in your iTunes library?

 

[Eithanius]

1. Right-click your song, OR select your song, hit Cmd+I
2. Go to Artwork tab, drag that artwork onto your Desktop.
3. Once in your desktop, select and hit Cmd+I. That should show you the resolution of the artwork. Typically ranges from 600x600 to upwards of 1400x1400 for latest releases.

If you need to change it to a smaller artwork, just proceed from step 2, delete the offending artwork, and drag in your preferred or smaller artwork. If you have more songs sharing the same artwork, you can select then all, hit Cmd+I, under Info tab, drag it into the artwork column, this will auto-update the same artwork on all the songs...


PS: My own preferred artwork ranges from 1000x1000 to 1500x1500, I don't really care about storage.

 

[ramparts]

Thanks!

I wonder if there's an easier way, i.e., one where I can look at the sizes/resolutions of album art for a lot of files at once, rather than going album by album (which would take ages).