FetchArt Plugin

The fetchart plugin retrieves album art images from various sources on the Web and stores them as image files.

Fetching Album Art During Import

To automatically get album art for every album you import, just enable the plugin by putting fetchart on your config file’s plugins line (see Plugins).

By default, beets stores album art image files alongside the music files for an album in a file called cover.jpg. To customize the name of this file, use the art_filename config option.

To disable automatic art downloading, just put this in your configuration file:

[fetchart]
autofetch: no

Manually Fetching Album Art

Use the fetchart command to download album art after albums have already been imported:

$ beet fetchart [-f] [query]

By default, the command will only look for album art when the album doesn’t already have it; the -f or --force switch makes it search for art regardless. If you specify a query, only matching albums will be processed; otherwise, the command processes every album in your library.

Image Resizing

A maximum image width can be configured as maxwidth to downscale fetched images if they are too big. The resize operation reduces image width to maxwidth pixels. The height is recomputed so that the aspect ratio is preserved.

Beets can resize images using PIL, ImageMagick, or a server-side resizing proxy. If either PIL or ImageMagick is installed, beets will use those; otherwise, it falls back to the resizing proxy. If the resizing proxy is used, no resizing is performed for album art found on the filesystem—only downloaded art is resized. Server-side resizing can also be slower than local resizing, so consider installing one of the two backends for better performance.

When using ImageMagic, beets looks for the convert executable in your path. On some versions of Windows, the program can be shadowed by a system-provided convert.exe. On these systems, you may need to modify your %PATH% environment variable so that ImageMagick comes first or use PIL instead.

Album Art Sources

Currently, this plugin searches for art in the local filesystem as well as on the Cover Art Archive, Amazon, and AlbumArt.org (in that order).

When looking for local album art, beets checks for image files located in the same folder as the music files you’re importing. If you have an image file called “cover,” “front,” “art,” “album,” for “folder” alongside your music, beets will treat it as album art and skip searching any online databases.

When you choose to apply changes during an import, beets searches all sources for album art. For “as-is” imports (and non-autotagged imports using the -A flag), beets only looks for art on the local filesystem.

Embedding Album Art

This plugin fetches album art but does not embed images into files’ tags. To do that, use the EmbedArt Plugin. (You’ll want to have both plugins enabled.)

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