FetchArt Plugin

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

To use the plugin, first enable it in your configuration (see Using Plugins). Then, install the requests library by typing:

pip install requests

The plugin uses requests to fetch album art from the Web.

Fetching Album Art During Import

When the plugin is enabled, it automatically gets album art for every album you import.

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:
    auto: 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 in Web databases 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. Beets prefers to use an image file whose name contains “cover”, “front”, “art”, “album” or “folder”, but in the absence of well-known names, it will use any image file in the same folder as your music files.

You can change the list of filename keywords using the cover_names config option. Or, to use only filenames containing the keywords and not fall back to any image, set cautious to true. For example:

fetchart:
    cautious: true
    cover_names: front back

By default, remote (Web) art sources are only queried if no local art is found in the filesystem. To query remote sources every time, set the remote_priority configuration option to true, which will cause beets to prefer remote cover art over any local image files.

When you choose to apply changes during an import, beets will search for art as described above. 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.)