Why is picard removing embedded images?

MusicBrainz Picard
1

Hi, I have all my files already embedded with the scanned cover art of my CDs and I’d like to keep them while updating my metadata.

I have the “clear existing tags” option enabled, and I also enabled “keep images when clearing tags” buti it still removes the images

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I also have the Cover Art section unchecked

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Any idea why it’s removing the images?

Thanks!

3

Might be a bug. What format are your files?

4

@macaumetal

It works perfectly for me. All checkboxes are reversed.

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5

Before Tagging he “Clear existing tags”.
After Tagging he “Write tags to files”.
But where did he get the tags?

6

@macaumetal

First try don’t “Clear existing tags”.

Picard updates tags without needing to clear them.

I’ve checked it.

7

All the files are flacs

8

I check the “clear existing tags” since I have some tags on the files I don’t want to keep.

For instance:

album dynamic range (db)
album dynamic range (r128)
catalog
country
upc
and others that I set manually in MP3Tag a while ago.
I find it easier to check that box than use a script to delete them.

Maybe I’m doing it wrong and there’s a better way.
What’s strange is that I had to make aclean windows install, and previous to that I had this config and no problem

9

Something to try, which may help identify if it’s a bug in Picard is to leave the “Embed cover images into tags” checked, but uncheck each of the “Cover Art Providers” instead.

2 Likes
10

I have a small suspicion what might be happening. FLACs use Vorbis comments for tags. But FLACs have their very own way of embedding images as an own data block, while for other Vorbis formats the images are written to a Vorbis comment tag METADATA_BLOCK_PICTURE.

Hence my suspicion is that your FLACs probably have the images set as METADATA_BLOCK_PICTURE instead of image blocks as expected for FLACs.

Would be interesting to see the output of the metaflac command line tool, or any other tool that shows the raw Vorbis comments, for one of your files with the image still intact.

You would run metaflac with the --list parameter to have it list all the tags in a file.

metaflac --list yourfile.flac

Looks like you are on Windows. Someone might also be able to name some alternative tool to show the raw tags, but I’m not too familiar with what is available on Windows.

A second thing to check is whether if you load one of those files into Picard onto the left pane whether it shows the embedded image.

3 Likes
11

Clean once and don’t do it again.

12

@macaumetal

Or maybe like this.

You don’t want to lose the embedded covers.

You just want to clean up the other tags.

So you can use Mp3Tag.

First make a copy.

Upload your catalog (1 for testing).

Use this guide:

Remove Fields Except

https://docs.mp3tag.de/actions/

https://docs.mp3tag.de/actions/remove-fields-except/

Then throw this cleaned catalog into Picard. Let it fill in the missing fields except for the covers.

Remember what @rdswift said:

uncheck the “Cover Art Providers” checkboxes.

13

Sorry for the delay in answering.
I don’t know if this was a bug that reset on closing the app, but I’m going through my albums and they’re keeping the embedded images, so I think it solved itself :person_shrugging:

Thanks you for your contributions!!