Thanks for your replies. I am quite active in adding coverart, but this is not the full solution. Sometimes I prefer a different cover and the ASIN to digital copies does not pull the coverart.
Yes, I have “clear existing tags” enabled, but I still do believe this is a bug. Also, if you take a look at the other thread that I have linked, it is confirmed that there is a bug.
I am working based on a nightly built, which includes fantastic changes to coverart. Unfortunately, it does not solve the issue I am describing here. As you can see from the other thread, there may be a fix available, but it requires someone to test before it goes to the nightly built. I would be happy to do so, but don’t know how to compile.
I have not tried adding APIC. Does this address the issue?
A big issue is that clear existing tags does not what most users expect. It is currently a very technical option, that completely deletes the tag data from the file and adds completely new tags. People usually don’t expect that this also removes the cover art (but technically the cover art is just another tag). There has been some improvement with the keep tags option, but it is still not very satisfying for images. Luckily @zas is working on this, but it has not yet been merged into the development version: http://tickets.musicbrainz.org/browse/PICARD-257
In the meantime the best workaround is to disable “Clear existing tags”. If you are retagging files you had previously tagged with this option enabled this should not really be an issue, as tags unknown to Picard had already been removed.
Update: After re-reading the linked discussion in the old forums I see that it has already all been said there, summary:
The option “Clear existing tags” will clear all tags, including images. Disable it and images will not be removed.
You can already choose some tags that get preserved, unfortunately this does not apply to images
There is work in progress on PICARD-257 to add a new feature to preserve images when “Clear existing tags” is active
Yup, Picard-257 is trying to solve the issue. Can anyone compile what Zas did and try whether it solves the issue. If so, I understand the developers would be willing to include into the nightly builds. Thanks in advance!
It adds an option “Preserve image tags”, that will preserve existing images if “Clear existing tags” is selected. Yes, this will solve the issue. It looks clean and solid so far, but @zas expressed concerns that it should be tested by somebody. Once this has happened it will be merged and made available in the nightlies.
Thanks a lot. Does your email imply that you have tested it? If so, could it be merged? Also, if someone can provide me with a compiled test built, I am more than happy to test it.
No, it hasn’t, yet. And posting here all the time won’t change that, as I don’t have the time at the moment. Why is disabling “Clear all Tags” not an acceptable workaround in the meantime? I mean that functionality has been this way since Picard exists, I am not quite sure why it suddenly is that urgent
In my experience turning off all the cover art features in the preferences prevents this. I prefer to manually add cover art when I know I have good tags.
I am still facing the same issue that coverart gets wiped out when retagging. There seems activity in development, but not approved yet. Let me know if you need anyone to test. Thanks!
Can’t help you if you’re (still?) using the “Clear existing tags” (I never touch it myself – I frequently don’t want what MB has, and it really helps to keep my edited fields around), but if you aren’t, you can right-click the artwork and select “Keep existing artwork”. You have to do that for every track every time you load it, but it works.
Thanks for the message. Yes, I’d like to have the option to preserve artwork when selecting “clear existing tags”. As in feature request 257 from 2012. It wasn’t opened by me, but I agree this is a good feature request (and received 17 votes). There is even a PR (https://github.com/metabrainz/picard/pull/422) and another user offered to test.
Is this something the developers are considering to implement? I am happy to test, but cannot code.
I’ve never tried it but there’s a plugin called Keep tags that sounds like it will do what you want in terms of keeping selected tags when Clear all tags is selected.
I may have missed it in the earlier discussion, but if the existing cover shows at the lower right corner, you should be able to right click on it and select the option to keep the existing cover art. I believe that you will need to do this with each album processed.
that’s the point of this feature request / bug fix.
i’d like to enable “clear tags”, but “preserve cover art”. the keep function allows me to keep all tags, but not coverart.
as rdswift points out, i can do it manually, but that’s not efficient. what’s missing is a setting to “preserve coverart” or a way how the keep function enables this. and/or a way to allow me to “existing tags” in the list of tags to use (besides amazon, archive, local tags, etc).
besides the mp4 issues, this for me is the major shortcoming of picard versus jaikoz and prevents me from retagging my library.
