How to Scan Your Music Library for Missing Album Art (File Browser Guide)
The File Browser is the fastest way to audit a whole music collection in Album Art Downloader. Point it at a folder, and it reads your files, lists every album it finds, and flags which ones are missing cover art — so you fix exactly what’s broken instead of guessing.
What the File Browser Does
- Scans folders for music files and groups them into albums.
- Reads the artist and album from each file’s tags — or, if your tags are a mess, from the folder and file names instead.
- Checks whether cover art is already present for each album and highlights the result: red rows mean artwork is missing, green rows mean it’s already there.
- You can also drag and drop a folder straight onto the File Browser window instead of browsing for it.
Step-by-Step: Find and Fix Missing Covers
1Open the File Browser
In Album Art Downloader, go to File → New → File Browser. A browser window opens with an empty file list.
2Point it at your music folder
Enter the path to the top-level folder of your music collection (for example, your “Music” folder) and click Search. The File Browser walks through the folder and lists every album it can identify.
3Read the red and green highlights
Rows highlighted red are albums with no cover art found. Rows highlighted green already have artwork and can be skipped. This is the whole point of the File Browser: you instantly see what needs fixing.
4Select the albums missing art
Select one album — or hold Ctrl to pick several, or Shift to select a range. Right-clicking a row also gives you handy options like Preview, Rename, Delete, or Open in Explorer.
5Get artwork for the selection
Click Get Artwork for Selection. A search window opens for each selected album and queries the enabled script sources in parallel. If you’re fixing a lot of albums at once, searches are queued automatically — you can watch and manage them in the Queue Manager, or double-click a queued search to run it immediately.
6Pick a cover and save it
Preview the thumbnails, click the one you want, then choose the cover type from the preset dropdown next to the save button — Front, Back, Inside, CD, and so on — and click Save. The image is saved into the album’s folder, by default as folder.jpg.
How It Identifies Your Albums
By default the File Browser reads the artist and album from your files’ metadata tags. If your tags are incomplete or inconsistent, you can switch it to determine the artist and album from a path pattern — for example, interpreting D:\Music\Pink Floyd\The Dark Side of the Moon\ as artist “Pink Floyd” and album “The Dark Side of the Moon”. Use whichever matches how your collection is actually organized.
Where the Covers Get Saved
When you launch a search from the File Browser, the save location is filled in for you and locked to the album’s folder, so covers always land next to the music they belong to. The default file name is folder.jpg — the name most players (including Windows Media Player, foobar2000, and car stereos) look for automatically. You can customize the save pattern in the settings, including placeholders and the Front/Back/Inside/CD presets, if you prefer a different naming scheme.