Hi, I’m new to this great software.
I got it to reorganise all my music by into Artist/Album/Song, which is epic.
For my clunky truck hard drive to display the album art, I need the album art metadata attached to the Album folder, whereas at the moment it sits with each individual Song.
Is there a way to do that?
Thanks!
In the options, under Cover Art, tick the box for “Save cover art images as separate files” and specify a filename that would work with your player.
Thanks for the suggestion. I have tried that. Unfortunately my truck system is too clunky to work with that. It relies on the album art being at the album folder level (I tried adding one manually to the album folder image and it worked).
Any idea how to automate that in MusicBrainz?
Can you show an example on how the file structure needs to be for your truck and how your files are named?
By default Picard will story the album art in the same folder as your files, so if you have one album folder with the songs as individual files it would place the album art in this album folder
The file structure is:-
Artist (folder)
Album (folder)
Song(s) (mp3 files)
It will display the album art if I change the album icon to the album cover (I have to do that manually). It will not show the album art if I save the album art jpegs in the album folder alongside the mp3 files.
It’s a total pain.
This is probably where you have lost me 
Is this also what you meant with “It relies on the album art being at the album folder level”?
Where and how exactly do you set this? Do you do this on your car system or on your computer? Are you using a specific tool for that? I originally assumed you would create a file in the album folder manually, but it sounds like you are doing something different.
What did you call that file? cover.jpg or folder.jpg? or something else?
and folder.jpg?
Thanks for bearing with me!
I take the cover art jpeg, copy it (on my iMac) then go into the album folder information and paste the art, changing the folder icon from the stock folder one to the icon art.
Have you tried naming it ‘folder.jpg’ (which I think IvanDobsky is getting at)?
That automatically sets the folder icon to that image on Windows - but honestly, might be tricky automating this for your truck…
Still not sure what you are describing here. Is “album folder information” an Apple thing? This is probably why your truck can’t see it.
As @aerozol is also pointing out - just name the image file folder.jpg and leave it in the album folder next to the MP3 files. That is a very wide old standard for the image file to be called. Especially on older phones and MP3 players. And I expect in your truck is the same. Older MP3 players just looked for a simple JPG and displayed it.
If folder.jpg does not work, try cover.jpg, album.jpg or even (album name.jpg).
I used to do exactly this for my old Blackberry phone, various androids, tablets and older MP3 players. Before embedded artwork this was the standard way of doing things.
Once you work out what the file name needs to be, Picard can do that for you.
Thanks, I’ll work on that.
Ok, that is a special macOS thing on how to store the folder icon. Technically this creates a hidden files called Icon$\r inside the folder, then attaches the image as a resource file as an extended file system attribute (see here). So this is not something Picard can currently do out of the box, but it could be done using a plugin.
It’s all a bit tricky and I am not too familiar with macOS, but this is interesting and I would like to come up with a plugin to handle this. Bu I can’t make any promises about this as I’m a bit limited in time currently.
Ah - I see I misread. So your truck uses a weird Apple method? Are you sure? That’s bonkers.
Any chance of a link to a manual or at least the make and model of the truck? I’ve never seen something follow an Apple method like that before. Seems weird you’d have to buy an Apple laptop just to add music to your truck.
I assume in that case it would follow the weird Windows method as well - where you right click a folder and go into the options, pick an image to set as the art, and then a hidden file is placed into the folder that contains the art.
I can’t remember if that hidden file was/is called folder.jpg (google didn’t help), but it was always annoying because it would hide it and also make the file hard to delete…
That wasn’t music, that was a little used OS option you are thinking off there. All folders in Windoze can get an image attached and then noted in desktop.ini.
The weird thing Windows did with music was to let Windows Media Player add hidden files to a folder without warning. They were annoying as they were hidden+system files meaning the average user had no idea how to find them and remove them as it usually required a Flamethrower™. THAT was the headache that followed music collections around. There was two files - AlbumArtSmall.jpg and Folder.jpg. They would especially haunt those huge Limewire folders of the past as hundreds of MP3 files would share the same cover image 
At least the Apple method never clashes with any other music player.
Outside the mad world of Apple and Microsoft inventing their own weird standards, loads of the earlier players just went with the single “drop an image in the same folder” option. Usually folder.jpg, cover.jpg or even album.jpg.
I used to live on the Winamp forums and remember going through the combinations for that player in the past.
The point is that both OS’ have a method of ‘attaching’ an image to a folder without dropping an obvious image file into the folder, and the truck software might be looking for that.
I have got a basic plugin to set the folder icon to the album cover when saving files 
To use the plugin please download the file albumfoldercover.py and place it in your Picard plugin folder at $HOME/Library/Preferences/MusicBrainz/Picard/plugins/. Then restart Picard and enable the “Album Folder Cover” plugin in Options > Plugins.
There are some things to be aware off, though:
sips, iconutil, Rez and SetFile) for which I am not sure if they are part of a standard macOS install or if they require xcode with the development utilities being installed. So please test and see if it worksIf this does not work as expected please look at Help > View Error/Debug log if there are any errors reported there.