Typically, beets stores album art in a “file on the side”: along with each album, there is a file (named “cover.jpg” by default) that stores the album art. You might want to embed the album art directly into each file’s metadata. While this will take more space than the external-file approach, it is necessary for displaying album art in some media players (iPods, for example).
This plugin was added in beets 1.0b8.
To automatically embed discovered album art into imported files, just enable the plugin (see Plugins). You’ll also want to enable the FetchArt Plugin to obtain the images to be embedded. Art will be embedded after each album is added to the library.
This behavior can be disabled with the autoembed config option (see below).
The embedart plugin provides a couple of commands for manually managing embedded album art:
The plugin has one configuration option, autoembed, which lets you disable automatic album art embedding. To do so, add this to your ~/.beetsconfig:
[embedart]
autoembed: no