Cover art size (the REAL one)

I remember the manual giving 140x140 pixels as the max cover size, but I know that’s wrong, because none of my covers are that small, yet many show up on my Fuze. I’m sure someone out there has figured out what you can use at a standard 96dpi. Anyone know for certain what the real max size is?

Thanks!

@g33z3r wrote:

I remember the manual giving 140x140 pixels as the max cover size, but I know that’s wrong, because none of my covers are that small, yet many show up on my Fuze. I’m sure someone out there has figured out what you can use at a standard 96dpi. Anyone know for certain what the real max size is?

 

Thanks!

 

A lot of my album art is 200x194 , 200x196, 200x198…whether the device resizes that or not, I don’t know. 

The device resizes everything down to a uniform dimension–it has to. But I know that if the cover art in your MP3 tag is over a certain size, the device won’t display it at all. I’m trying to figure out what the golden numbers are.

@g33z3r wrote:
The device resizes everything down to a uniform dimension–it has to. But I know that if the cover art in your MP3 tag is over a certain size, the device won’t display it at all. I’m trying to figure out what the golden numbers are.

I’ve never used MP3Tag, so I can’t answer that question. :smiley:

All my album art that gets loaded on portable devices is 240x240x72dpi, and it all works fine on the Fuze.  The majority of them are <10kB files, so they don’t take much space.

I’m realizing that it’s less about the dimensions or resolution of the original bitmap and more about it’s memory footprint in kilobytes.

I used to use MusicMatch Jukebox to add tags to my MP3s. I have just discovered that the software regularly inflated the size of album art by a factor of 10. Opening these old tags in MP3Tag, I’m finding the album art bitmaps as large as 200-400 kb. How they got so big, I don’t know. But I can remove the bitmap and paste it back at about a tenth of the original memory size with the same dimensions and resolution.

It’s those old, inflated bitmaps that aren’t being displayed in my Fuze. I just have to replace them all.

Message Edited by G33Z3R on 03-29-2009 06:31 AM

I’ve replaced THOUSANDS of images in my MP3s. I found out what’s been happening: the software I once used for tagging did so with the .BMP format, which gave me HUGE images none of my devices could display. Also, I found that simply cutting & pasting from the Internet can cause a loss of file compression, giving you images three or four times larger than they should be.

Album art won’t show up if the graphic is of the wrong file type OR takes up too much RAM (memory).

This has caused me an ENORMOUS problem: I have over 50,000 MP3’s, and most of them have bad cover art that needs to be replaced. I’ve been working away at this for weeks.

The software used to add cover art can be to blame: MusicMatch Jukebox would save cover art as .BMP files. These are not compressed graphic files, and can be HUGE. A 170x170 pixel .BMP can weigh in at 255Kb. Some of my MP3s had cover art nearly a full megabyte in size!!!

File format can be to blame: Some web sites have .GIF and .PNG cover art files, which can be large or incompatible. Better to use .JPG files, which can be compressed to very small sizes.

Copy & paste can be to blame: If you copy an image from a website and paste it directly into your MP3 tagging utility, the image will not likely be compressed. It may be three or four times larger than it should. Instead, save the image to your hard drive as a compressed .JPG. Even if it is an online .JPG image, save it to your hard drive—this compresses the file; add it to your MP3 after saving.

The physical size of the image may be to blame: You do not need 500x500 pixel cover art. No player will display it that size. Try to keep your cover art under 200x200 pixels. A good size is around 170x170 pixels.

Pay attention to what type of file you’re using for cover art and the size in pixels!!!

Use .JPG images under 200x200 pixels—they’ll show up in all your devices and should weigh in at 20Kb or less.

Free software, such as GIMP, will allow you to edit images and save them as .JPGs.

MP3Tag, also free, tells you what type of file you’re using and it’s size. Pretty cool…

I have a file called “folder.jpg” in every album folder on my hard drive. When I do not have an entire album, or album contents are spread across many folders, I’ll save the .JPG to my hard drive, add the image to the appropriate MP3, then overwrite or delete the image later. Once an image is added to an MP3, it becomes part of the MP3 file—you no longer need the original .JPG.

GIMP is fine if you want a feature packed image editor.  Personally, I like the ease and simplicity of Easy Thumbnails.  You can set it up to resize your images to any size of your choosing and can make global changes, if desired.  One or two mouse clicks is all it takes.   Elegant, Simple and Free…

_ Good show, G33Z3R! _

Thanks for posting your findings. I’m sure it will help (at least some) people encountering album art problems. :smiley:

Hey, that Easy Thumbnails program—does it modify stand-alone images only, or can it modify the thumbnails that are actually embedded in your MP3 tags?

I’ve gone through my library and fixed everything. I had to change image formats, rescale, square, crop, brighten, save and replace tens of thousands of album covers. Took so very long to do.

I can imagine a program automatically rescaling, but a lot of other things I did probably have to be done manually. **bleep** OCD!

Let me re-interate one of G33Z3R’s points: the embedded image must be JPG or BMP (JPG takes less memory).

I wondered why the embedded image for a podcast I subscribe to suddenly would not show up on the Fuze.  Inspecting the image with MP3Tag I found the producer switched from the standard JPG image in earlier episodes to a new *GIF* image of the company logo!  I simply exported the image to my desktop, used Paint.NET to convert it to a JPG, then re-insesrted the JPG to the MP3 file, and now it displays fine on the Fuze.  (I did it just to be sure the issue really was the image type – I don’t really care that much about album art for podcasts…).

I’ve done some trial and error with the album art size and here’s what I’ve found.

150x150 or larger is “too big”.  Meaning the image will have to be resized to fit the panel and image distortion will be noticable.

110x110 or smaller is “too small”.  Meaning the image will have a black border around it because apparently images are not scaled up to fit the panel.

I didn’t try every size in between, but I stopped at 120x120 (72dpi) and the image wasn’t distorted and didn’t have a black border.  This allowed me to store a JPEG of 98% quality at 17.4KB.

@g33z3r wrote:

Hey, that Easy Thumbnails program—does it modify stand-alone images only, or can it modify the thumbnails that are actually embedded in your MP3 tags?

 

I’ve gone through my library and fixed everything. I had to change image formats, rescale, square, crop, brighten, save and replace tens of thousands of album covers. Took so very long to do.

 

I can imagine a program automatically rescaling, but a lot of other things I did probably have to be done manually. **bleep** OCD!

It should not take a long time. If you want to do batch processing of many images, I can recommend the free ImageMagick software (Linux, Windows, Mac). E.g. you could resize all your gif images in a given directory to a maximum of 120 pixel in any dimension by issueing the following command in a DOS terminal:

FOR %a in (\*.gif) DO imconvert %a -resize 120x120 small\_%a

More elaborated batch processing examples using Windows can be found here.

@tastywheat wrote:

I didn’t try every size in between, but I stopped at 120x120 (72dpi) and the image wasn’t distorted and didn’t have a black border.  This allowed me to store a JPEG of 98% quality at 17.4KB.

I wish I’d have seen this thread earlier, I found out ages ago that 120×120 is indeed the native resolution. :slight_smile: