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This is a instructable describing how to cumbersomely export your existing iTunes album art and arrange all the covers into a huge grid, leaving you with a gigantic, colourful and vibrant mishmash of popular culture ready for printing and, maybe later, your wall!
I decided I wanted to do this a couple of nights ago and now I've come up with a method, it's not really complicated but can be rather time-consuming depending on how large your library is.
I have around 800 albums with attached album art and it took at least an hour, granted most of that time is spent watching your computer doing all the work for you.
The process requires you to download some free applications (links supplied) and you also need a new-ish version of Photoshop (I use CS3) although I'll show you an alternate way of getting basically the same results with Google's free digital photo organizer, Picasa2.
So, for Windows only at the moment, but I'm sure some Mac user can come up with an easier and cooler way to do this. Damn you, I'm switching soon anyway.
More advanced users can check out Step 7 right away for a quick rundown.
I decided I wanted to do this a couple of nights ago and now I've come up with a method, it's not really complicated but can be rather time-consuming depending on how large your library is.
I have around 800 albums with attached album art and it took at least an hour, granted most of that time is spent watching your computer doing all the work for you.
The process requires you to download some free applications (links supplied) and you also need a new-ish version of Photoshop (I use CS3) although I'll show you an alternate way of getting basically the same results with Google's free digital photo organizer, Picasa2.
So, for Windows only at the moment, but I'm sure some Mac user can come up with an easier and cooler way to do this. Damn you, I'm switching soon anyway.
More advanced users can check out Step 7 right away for a quick rundown.
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Signing UpStep 1Locating your iTunes album art
First we need to make sure you actually have some album art to work with.
There's several ways to go about this; you can import the covers automatically from the iTunes Store or you can painstakingly do it by hand for every album.
- Automatically
- By hand
I imported all mine into iTunes by hand, partly because I'm kinda picky and want them all the same size but mostly because I listen to weird electronic music that's just not available in the iTunes Store, forcing me to find the cover art from Discogs.com, Google image search and elsewhere.
Anyway, I will assume you have at least some album art in iTunes (the more the better) and move on.
So let's locate the images on your computer.
The problem, and the one thing that makes this instructable even worth sharing to begin with, is that the images are not readable by Photoshop as is and that they're all spread out into hundreds of strangely nested folders with strange names.
Therefore, we need to decode them and copy them all into one place.
The default folder for your artwork should be in "My Documents\My Music\iTunes\Album Artwork\Local"
If you can't find it there just do a search for the folder "album artwork" on your C: drive.
If you navigate around a bit from here you'll notice that it's very messy, so we have to find all the *.itc files (those are actually just renamed png images with some extra header data) that are thrown around in the myriad of folders and copy them into a new folder so that we can manipulate them without destroying your iTunes setup.
From the Local folder, click Search in your Explorer bar (CTRL-F) and search for any file that has "itc" in it's file name and after a while you should be presented with a list of all the cover art files.
Now, make a new folder somewhere else, maybe on your desktop, Select All the files (CTRL-A) and copy them into your newly made folder.
Make sure you copy the files, don't just move them or you will mess up your iTunes library!
There's several ways to go about this; you can import the covers automatically from the iTunes Store or you can painstakingly do it by hand for every album.
- Automatically
- By hand
I imported all mine into iTunes by hand, partly because I'm kinda picky and want them all the same size but mostly because I listen to weird electronic music that's just not available in the iTunes Store, forcing me to find the cover art from Discogs.com, Google image search and elsewhere.
Anyway, I will assume you have at least some album art in iTunes (the more the better) and move on.
So let's locate the images on your computer.
The problem, and the one thing that makes this instructable even worth sharing to begin with, is that the images are not readable by Photoshop as is and that they're all spread out into hundreds of strangely nested folders with strange names.
Therefore, we need to decode them and copy them all into one place.
The default folder for your artwork should be in "My Documents\My Music\iTunes\Album Artwork\Local"
If you can't find it there just do a search for the folder "album artwork" on your C: drive.
If you navigate around a bit from here you'll notice that it's very messy, so we have to find all the *.itc files (those are actually just renamed png images with some extra header data) that are thrown around in the myriad of folders and copy them into a new folder so that we can manipulate them without destroying your iTunes setup.
From the Local folder, click Search in your Explorer bar (CTRL-F) and search for any file that has "itc" in it's file name and after a while you should be presented with a list of all the cover art files.
Now, make a new folder somewhere else, maybe on your desktop, Select All the files (CTRL-A) and copy them into your newly made folder.
Make sure you copy the files, don't just move them or you will mess up your iTunes library!
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360 albums, 24 columns, 15 rows
that makes each album cover 80 by 80 pixels and fits perfectly!
24 x 80 being 1920 and
15 x 80 being 1200
therefore 1920 by 1200 wallpaper
www.easyduplicatefinder.com/download.html
Sometimes it finds folders of your photos but a lot of the time it doesn't and won't import them properly. I think I have narrowed this down to it not liking the pictures being resized to 200x200 pixels.
The pictures that it does import are bigger than that size (I'm talking about the original file sizes before re-sizing), hence it will actually show them. But as soon as you resize them to the smaller size then Picasa will not import them properly.
You cannot resize the pictures in Picasa as it doesn't allow you to do that.
Now the other annoying thing is that when you use the Photoshop method it displays the names for each individual picture in the grid. So there is a lot of messing about to do to get it to look just right. Sorry for the long post!
I think both your annoyances can be remedied. Inside Photoshop, make sure you uncheck "Use filename as caption" inside the Contact Sheet settings, as per my screenshot in the Instructable.
As for the Picasa problem, select "Small Pictures" in the "View" menu.
Let me know if this works.
Thanks very much for that. I tried the remedy in photoshop also but I prefer to use the Picasa method as you can create a nice border round the pictures and easily add spaces between each picture to the size you want. I know I could probably do this in Photoshop but as you can see, I'm not very technically minded lol.
Thanks a lot for your help.
P.S. Richard D.James rocks!
First I recursively searched for all jpgs in my folder tree that were above 10k using gnome-search-tool
Saved the results as jpgs.txt
Created a bash script to copy the jpgs to a folder with IFS stuff for dealing with white space
#!/bin/bash
SAVEIFS=$IFS
IFS=$(echo -en "\n\b")
for file in `cat jpgs.txt`
do
echo "processing $file"
cp "$file" $RANDOM.jpg
done
IFS=$SAVEIFS
Then mogrified the jpgs to make sure they were all 300x300
mogrify -resize 300x300! *.jpg
Created many smaller montages, since 2400 jpgs will crash montage
montage -tile 7x7 *.jpg montage.jpg
Loaded all of the smaller montage pics into gimp and aligned them to grid to create a giant montage.jpg
Converted montage.jpg to pdf so I could use pdfposter
convert montage.jpg montage.pdf
pdfposter -v -s 1 montage.pdf pdfposter.pdf
pdfposter dumps out a pdf a la rasterbator, so I can print out my 7.5 square foot poster on A4... without the rasterizing of rasterbator..
and that's that.
http://www.google.com/search?q=itunes+store+%22no+credit+card%22
go here and use this code as if it were a giftcard under the redeem menu.
after that (whether or not it works [ie, you are Canadian like me]) you can choose the none option in your payment options.
hope that helps everyone
i type in "copy /b * test.tes" but it says:
the system cannot find the file specified
0 file<s> copied.
please help!!!
thanks
when using fotosizer do the settings FIRST before adding appropriate folder.
once the folder has been selected it automatically converts to the default custom size. if you have over 1500 files it takes a while and if you try to alter the settings as it runs it crashes.
http://www.krrrk.com/downloads.htm