Improved Artwork Management for Music

[TheMonkeyBob 1]

I have done a fair bit of messing around with trying to optimize artwork management for music. What I have found is that the cover artwork used for a song is based off of a combination of the Album/Disc Number/Artist. If those three piece of metadata are the same between files, then the artwork will be that of the first file processed by Emby. This is normally fine, as artwork usually does not change often enough for it to be a problem. However, in the case that artwork does change very often, this system causes a real headache to fix as you have to go to each individual song with the wrong artwork and change it manually. You can name an image file the same name as the music file and it will pull the artwork that way, but then you have to duplicate the cover image for each song and rename it to match the music files individually.

Additionally, if you want backdrop/fanart images for specific songs or discs, there is not easy way to do that other than to go to each and every song and set it manually, one at a time.

This issue could be mostly mitigated by being able to select multiple items at once and set an image for all of them at the same time, but that is not a feature.

 

It would be very helpful if the artwork management process were improved for music.

I think it would be great and far more powerful if metadata tags were created to be able to specify artworks to be used. Like you could add the tag EMBY-COVER to an audio file and it would have the filename of the cover artwork to use, and then you could also have a tag like EMBY-BACKDROP to specify the backdrop to use. This would also make it very easy to change the artwork later if needed.