iPhone Album art is all over the place....

[Pukey]

I just ran into this problem today when I connected my iPhone to my MacBook Pro to backup my iPhone. As I connected my iPhone, I noticed the album artwork changed on my iPhone. All of the album artwork on iTunes on my Mac is fine, it's just on my iPhone that it's messed up. This is really frustrating, I've never had this problem before. It affects all the album artwork for all my songs on my iPhone. I've tried deleting all the music on my iPhone then re-syncing all my music to no avail. Just accepting this is not an option for me, I rely on my album artwork as a way to find music in my library. If anyone is aware of a fix for this please post! FWIW I'm running macOS 12.1 and iOS 15.2. I don't use iCloud or Music Match, so those shouldn't be a factor.

 

[ScottW1]

@Pukey - This just happened to my wife when she synced some new music to her iPhone 13 last week. What seemed to fix it was (a) Delete all music from iPhone, (b) Force reboot, (c) Connect to PC and sync. All the artwork looked good after that.

But I seem to recall when it happened to me a while back -- it took several tries before it worked. Almost like the phone was keeping the old artwork cached and re-associating it (at random) with new songs being synced. Complete mess. I think the key may be the "forced reboot" since it supposedly invokes some additional file system checks on reboot.

Good luck... Be sure to post back with what solves it for you!

 

[Pukey]

Thank you ScottW1, I'll give that a try. I started a new thread on this subject under iOS 15 because the problem still persists in iOS 15.

 

[Pukey]

Thanks again ScottW1, I tried your fix and at first it didn't work so I completely deleted not only my music library, but also my Music app. After doing this then force-rebooting then re-syncing I now have the correct album art correlating with the individual songs but all of my playlists still show incorrect album art. I guess I will just have to live with this unless the issue resolves itself.

 

[ScottW1]

Glad you got it (mostly) fixed.

It is really frustrating that this problem (or variations of it) has been around for YEARS!

 

[SusanPLambe]

Thanks for the info @ScottW1. You're quite right — this has literally been going on for years. I actually completely abandoned iTunes because it's just so darn clunky for PC and have been using Spotify for my music. But now that Apple Music is lossless, I thought I'd give it another go, thinking that *surely* they'd have fixed the album art bug. But nope. Anyhoo, I followed your process and it worked. Not sure if it makes a difference, but I re-synced the phone *before* re-installing the Music app. Album art seems to be all be ok ...

 

[iTunesHeAdAcHe]

I also have the same issue. Tried every possible fix listed on this site and others. I used to feel like slapping people who bashed iTunes, now I feel like slapping myself out of sheer frustration. 🤬