Album art weirdness & mystery

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I use MP3Tag v2.40. I have a Sansa Fuze :music: .

I noticed that some of my album art wouldn't appear on the Fuze. With Mp3tag and my PC, I checked out the tags, and found some JPGs as large as 500KB!!! In fact, a lot of them are 170x170 pixels and 255KB!!! It doesn't make sense!

Now, I used to use MusicMatch Jukebox to tag files. I stopped using that crap software a long time ago. I strongly suspect that it created my freaky large JPGs.

But there is other weirdness:

I recently noticed that if I copy a 200x200 or 240x240 JPG from the Internet onto the Windows Clipboard, then paste that JPG into MP3Tag, I'll get a file size of 30-50KB. However, if I first save that JPG to my hard drive, then use the Add Cover option in MP3Tag, the same JPG will only be half the size—about 15 to 25KB.

Remember, the JPG size in KB determines whether or not the album art appears on my Fuze; although these are just kilobytes, they still matter.

Does anyone understand why JPGs are so much larger when passing through the Windows Clipboard? Is there some kind of secret watermarking going on or something?

2

Thanks for the replies!

I've learned that copying an image off the web to the Windows Clipboard leaves you with an uncompressed graphic. Saving the same images to the hard drive (as JPGs), then adding them to your MP3 tags reduces the size of the images by as much as 90% (or more).