If you’ve got an iPod, iPad, or iPhone, chances are you’ve got some music on your Mac that you’ve copied over to your device. Even more likely is that if you have copied music over, you’ve run into your fair share of songs and albums that lack proper album artwork. I know the feeling.

Today I was using Cover Flow on my iPhone to peruse my music and ran into the default “can’t find your album” iTunes artwork icon. I absolutely abhor that little gray music note against that black square. It’s as if my music is laughing at my inability to find some good album art to occupy this empty space, which is something I simply cannot abide. While there is no way to add album art to songs or albums directly from your iDevice, there is a way, using iTunes, to figure out which tracks are lacking that album art pizzaz.

Smart Playlists Earn Their Degree

You may have never used smart playlists before, but rest assured they are easy to create and make media filtering in iTunes as simple as possible. What sets smart playlists apart from regular playlists is that smart playlists require certain rules be created to function properly. Regular playlists let you click and drag whatever media you want into them to make a custom way to playback your files.

First off, click on “File” in the menu bar and choose “New Smart Playlist…” from the drop down menu. A window will appear with some default rules already set up. Click on “Artist” and choose “Media Kind,” I know, there are a lot of choice to set up with a smart playlist.

It should automatically be set to “is” and “Music.” Next click on the “+”just to the right of the “Music” option. Click on the next set and choose “Has Artwork” and change the next drop down to “is false” if it’s not already set. Click on “OK.”

Where Album Art Comes From

Now that you’ve got a fresh new Smart Playlist lets get some artwork. Click on your newly made playlist and you’ll see all the songs you have with no artwork. You can click on individual songs to highlight them or click on the first track in an album, hold down the shift key, and then click on the last track in the album to highlight all the tracks in between. After you’ve highlighted the tracks you want, click on “Advanced” in the menu bar and select “Get Album Artwork.” You will need to be logged in to your iTunes account because this step accesses Apple’s iTunes artwork catalog to retrieve the artwork.

Google Me Some Art

If iTunes fails to yield results you can Google the name of the album and artist plus “album art.” Click on “images” and you’ll see a cascade of album art relevant to your tunes. Click on the artwork you want to represent your music and drag it to the desktop. From here, head back to iTunes and click on the music track(s) you want to add the artwork to. Click on “File” in the menu bar, then click on “Get Info.” If you only have one track selected you’ll have to click on “Artwork” and then click and drag the album art from the desktop to the empty white space under the Artwork tab. If you have multiple tracks selected you’ll have to drag the album art from the desktop to the artwork box in the “Info” tab.

While it may seem like a bit of work, there is nothing like a pristine music collection free of empty artwork spaces.