i’ve tried everything, but keep doesn’t work with artwork. whatever i do, it gets wiped out. any other thoughts?
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.
I presume you deselected ‘clear all tags’ before using keep.
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.
May I ask why you need “Clear tags”, then? I’ve never understood that option unless someone has horribly mangled their files, and it sounds like you have them mostly as you want them, if out of date.
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I like my tags to be clean and many of my old MP3s have horrible tags (comments, bit rates, mbz things, compilation tags, etc). i know i could technically just ignore them and not other. but don’t we all use picard because we like our tags nice and tidy? 
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also, even if i disable “clear tags”, picard still replaces my coverart with new coverart. there is no option to “keep/protect” it or to have local tags as one option in the priority list for coverart.
this feature really should get more attention as it is quite annoying to lose cover art on every MB change. I don’t want picard to do anything with my cover images, and I depend on “clear existing tags” for other stuff.
it has been 6 years
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I just found out that this indeed removes all artwork too.
I wasn’t expecting that (haven’t given it much thought too), until I realized it had deleted a lot of artwork from my files.
Since it doesn’t seem likely that an option to preserve artwork will be implemented anytime soon, it would probably be a good idea to at least append a text like “Warning: this will also remove all artwork” to the next release of Picard.
Many users will not be fully aware that ‘tags’ also pertains to artwork and will not be happy when they find out the hard way.
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Can I ask a small question about this thread. I tried reading it but got confused.
Are you only talking about EMBEDDED artwork here? Only about EMBEDDED artwork being lost \ overwritten and Picard does not touch any of the JPG or PNG files in the same folder.
Yes, this is about embedded artwork.
I don’t believe Picard is capable of deleting files.
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Thanks for confirming that. I thought that was the case. I let Picard grab all the artwork MB has and it just keeps adding it to the folder alongside what it got last time.
I would therefore ask the warning is more specific - “Warning: this will also remove all embedded artwork”
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If you use the Classical Extras plugin (v2.0+), this can be achieved by checking the box on the “Tag mapping” tab labelled
Do not show any file tags that are NOT listed above AND NOT listed in the main Picard "Preserve tags..." option (Options->Tags), even if "Clear existing tags" is not selected.
If you don’t want any of the classical works functionality (which slows things because of the lookups) just disable it on the “Works and parts” tab. Also disable anything on the the first two tabs that you don’t want.
Make sure that the main “Clear existing tags” is disabled! And that you have listed the tags you want to preserve. If you want Picard to preserve the tags and append any new info to them (rather than overwrite), add them to the
List existing file tags which will be appended to rather than over-written by tag mapping...
box on the tag mapping tab.
Maybe someone would like to create a plugin that just has this capability, or incorporate it in the main Picard app 
BTW, if you are using the plugin like this but then also using the full functionality for classical music, you may wish to copy your Picard.ini file so that you have the options saved, and/or use the boxes labelled
Save plugin details and options in a tag?
on the “advanced” tab.
EDIT: I should point out that (at the moment) the plugin doesn’t physically delete the tags from your file - it just prevents them from appearing in the bottom panel of Picard. This may or may not be what you want.
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Thanks, it’s impressive how powerful your plugin is.
To be honest, I haven’t tried v2 of your plugin yet, since at the moment I am mostly focused on getting my non-classical library in perfect shape.
Classical is next…
I was trying out Picard’s ‘clear tags’ option to see if it would be helpful in getting my tags as lean and mean as possible.
But the risks and drawbacks are too great for me, so I won’t use that option again anytime soon.
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