Album Art Copy Overview

Note: Most people don't need this feature, which I added years ago when it was relevant.

If all your music files have embedded Album Art (e.g. Amazon downloads) you probably don't need this feature. It might be useful if you have a lot of songs ripped from CD's, without embedded Album Art, but the album folders have a cover image file.

Some MP3 players and phones display the album cover of the currently playing song if a file with that image is in the album folder on the player, typically named "Folder.jpg". This program compares the album folders on your computer with the album folders on your player and identifies the matching folders. After you approve the matches (and omit any you don't want) it copies the album art files from the computer to the matching folders on the player. The entire process takes a couple of minutes, instead of having to manually copy each album art file to the appropriate folder on the player.

You shouldn't need this program if your MP3 player syncs correctly with Windows Media Player (or other synchronization program), or if you rely on album art embedded in the music files. When WMP copies music files to your player, it should also copy the album art files if present. Unfortunately some players don't properly interact with the sync program to copy the album art files. Some don't copy album art files at all. In less severe cases, a player may copy most album art correctly, but get confused in some situations like multiple album folders with the same name (e.g. different artists' albums both named "Greatest Hits"). In other cases the sync program might copy an ugly low resolution version of the album art to the player.

Requirements:
Your phone or MP3 player must have an option to connect to the computer in "UMS" or "MSC" mode, i.e. so you can see it as a drive letter in My Computer. If the music is on removable storage like an SD card, you can connect the card to your computer as a drive. The program also assumes the music files on your computer are stored in Artist\Album subfolders. (That folder arrangement is automatically created on your player when you sync with WMP or other programs).

Alternative method without this program:
If the album art files don't copy correctly to your player when you sync music, you can instead have Windows Media Player embed the image in each music file, so you don't need separate image files. See the WMP help for details. You can find other programs that take less of your time if you have a lot of MP3 files to retrospectively embed images in, such as freeware Mp3Tag (which I use).