How to extract cover art from m4a?

[FlavioB]

Hi all.
Does anybody know of a tool to extract cover art from m4a files? Possibly running on OS X or eventually online (website)…

Thanks,
F.

[outsidecontext]

I don’t know of other tools, but actually you can do this with Picard. Explicitly saving the file’s cover art as a file is currently a bit hidden, but possible:

One way is to load the file into Picard, then select it. Picard should display the files cover art on the lower right. Click the button “Show details”, then double click the cover art in the details dialog. It should open in your default image viewer, where you can save it.

See also the following answer:

Is there a way to copy/paste artwork?

Not directly, though you can use some kind of hidden features to make this happen. First, should you have the cover already as a separate file, you can select the file where you want to have this cover art and drag and drop the image file from your file manager to the cover art box. In Picard 2.5 and later you can also right click the cover art box and select “choose local file…”. If you don’t have the cover as a separate file you can use a kind of hidden trick to save it as a file. Select the…

[sibilant]

Two more macOS tools that can do this:

Kid3, a tag editor:

1. Open the file in Kid3
2. Click the Edit button (or, double-click the thumbnail image)
3. Click Export

AtomicParsley, a CLI tool for MPEG-4 metadata:

AtomicParsley myfile.m4a -E