Related link: http://tpemble.urfbownd.net/itunes.php
The album cover images in iTunes are just 170 pixels wide, but higer-resolution versions are hidden away on Apple’s site. A fellow named Tristan figured out how to retrieve these 600-pixel-wide images and wrote a PHP-based Web page to do it. (Thanks to Hack a Day for the tip.)
To grab the big images,
- Click the little gray arrow next to the album’s name in iTunes. The window will switch to the Music Store view.
- Right-click the 170-pixel cover image that shows up and select “Copy iTunes Music Store URL” from the pop-up menu.
- Go to Tristan’s iTunes Art page, paste the URL into the box, and click the submit button. (Here’s one to try: http://phobos.apple.com/WebObjects/MZStore.woa/wa/viewAlbum?playlistId=37516)
Below the search box, you’ll now see two new URLs, one for the small image and one for the large one. They differ in just the last few characters—170x170-99.jpg vs. 600x600-100.jpg.
I’m trying to figure out how the script maps the album URL to the image URL. I tried entering a bogus value for the playlistId variable and got an error page with some URLs, but couldn’t make much sense of them. Any ideas?
As for what to do with high-res art-on-demand, here’s a bit of inspiration.
Yeah, I know 600px isn’t truly high-res, but it should allow some interesting tricks. So how does the mapping work?
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Comments (3)
Read More Entries by David Battino.
Oops
Interesting. Your pop-up trick worked for me on a few songs that had artwork I ’d embedded with Clutter (http://www.sprote.com/clutter). When I did a Get Info on the songs in iTunes and selected the artwork tab, I could then drag the image in the Get Info window to the desktop. That worked for the one song I’ve bought from the iTunes Music Store, too.
A faster way to extract the embedded art (for Mac users, anyway) is with Doug Adams’s script Save Album Art to Album Folder (http://www.dougscripts.com/itunes/scripts/ss.php?sp=savealbumart).
But I’m still wondering how to access the artwork on the Apple site.... —David Battino
Oops
I take that back. That's only if you've purchased the music.
iTunes app already has large album art
Maybe your point was to be able to use the images outside of iTunes, but FWIW, iTunes itself already shows larger versions of the artwork--they're not exactly hidden away. Click on the artwork in the "Now playing" pane for a song purchases thru the iTunes music store. A large version will pop up in a new window (and not just scaled up from the small one).