How does album art get recognized?

Support
1

Sometimes album art is shown in Winamp / Android music player, if it’s embedded in the mp3 or if there’s a image in the folder.

Is there a way to ONLY show album art in mp3tag if there’s actual art embedded in the file? Because I don’t want to keep a seperate image in the folder, which is going to picked up by the image scanner of android, cluttering up my image albums.

Right now if I click on a song in mp3 tag, it will show a art preview, but I only know if it’s from the separate image in a folder if I first delete that image and then reload the mp3. But then if the image is missing, I have to restore the folder image and then embed it. Very cumbersome.

2

You can filter for files without embedded images with
%_covers% MISSING
or look for files that have embedded images with
%_covers% PRESENT

3

Thanks, never knew about this filter function

4

There is more to manage one's collection with the help of the filter, see the documentation:

5

There is an Option - Tags: "Don't display first image from file directory as cover art"

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From the documentation:

Don’t display first image from file directory as cover art

Mp3tag can display the first image from the file’s directory as cover art in the Tag Panel if the file has no embedded cover art. You can restrict cover display to embedded cover art with this option.

6

If this option is unchecked and Mp3tag shows a picture in the folder you also can recognize this. If the picture is embedded in the file Mp3tag will show image/jpeg or image/png aside the displayed picture. If the displayed picture is a file from the folder it will show the name of the file.

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7

Yep, you are right.
An external cover picture would look like this (with deactivated option):
image

The same cover picture embedded as metadata would look like this:
image

As you say, the main differences are the visible external file name for the external cover picture, and the visible cover type ('Front Cover') for the embedded case.

The dimension and the picture size is visible in both cases.