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Cover art: where it comes from and how to fix it

Every cover in Vesari Stylus comes from one of two places on disk, and a third step fetches one when neither exists. Which applies decides whether an album shows a cover or a placeholder.

The order a cover is resolved in

For any track, the app asks two questions in order.

1. Is there a cover image file for this album? A picture in the album's own folder, found during the scan. It is resolved once per folder, not per track, so every file there shares it, and if it can be read it wins.
2. Do the track's own tags carry an embedded picture? With no readable image file, the app falls back to the picture inside the audio file.

If neither answers, the track has no artwork, and that is what Library Health counts under Missing artwork: no image file in the folder and nothing embedded in the tags. A cover living only in the tags is not missing.

Hence a common surprise: an album folder holding a forgotten cover.jpg shows that cover even when every file carries a different embedded one. The tag editor says so under the preview: Folder image shown, this file also has embedded art.

Which image file the scan picks

The scan takes three passes.

1. Conventional names in the album folder: cover, folder, front, artwork or albumart, with a .jpg, .jpeg or .png extension, in any capitalisation. The first one found wins.
2. Those same names one folder down, so a Covers or Scans subfolder is checked too.
3. A best guess among the remaining images, in the folder and one level below. Nothing wins by being found first here: each image is scored on its filename and the highest score takes it. front scores highest, then cover, folder, artwork and albumart, then art and album, an unnamed lone image last.

That pass also refuses images on purpose: never one whose filename carries the word back, rear, cd, disc, tray, booklet, inlay, obi, spine, matrix, inside, inner or lyrics. Matching is on whole words, split on anything that is not a letter or a number, so Disco Inferno.jpg is safe and only a standalone cd counts.

The cached copy

Vesari keeps its own copy of each resolved cover, shrinking a large one on the way in so grids draw instantly. The cache rebuilds itself, so losing it costs nothing. Two cases still surface in Library Health under Cover art too large / undecodable. An image claiming impossible dimensions, or one too large to decode at all, is dropped rather than cached: the track imports normally and the album shows a placeholder until you replace it. And a cover shared by several differently tagged albums in one folder is cached only for the album that clearly owns it, so one stray cannot claim the rest.

Fetching a cover when you have none

The Missing artwork card offers two buttons, both acting on exactly the tracks the card counts. Search art re-checks the folders on disk, which is what you want after dropping cover files in yourself. Online looks on the internet.

The online fetch prefers precision. When Super-Tag or a rip has already matched an album to a specific MusicBrainz release, the app asks the Cover Art Archive for that release's front cover. Only with no matched release, or no front cover on file for it, does it fall back to an artist and album text search on a second public source. See What the online lookups send.

It will not settle for a back cover or a booklet scan there, and it leaves your own artwork alone: a track that already has a folder image or an embedded picture is skipped and reported as left alone, not as still missing.

Setting the art yourself

The Album Art panel in the tag editor is the direct route.

• Choose Image… embeds a picture from your own computer. With several tracks selected it reads Set Art for All Selected… and applies one image to all of them.
• Search online searches by artist and album and embeds the result you click.
• Clear Art removes the embedded picture only, and greys out when the file has none. Its tooltip points at the folder image instead: delete that file to remove it.

Everything on this panel writes into the audio file itself.

Where each kind of cover lives

How you got it	Where it lives	Travels with the file
A cover image file in the album folder	Your music folder	Only if you copy the image too
Embedded, from the tag editor or a rip	Inside the audio file	Yes
Fetched by the Online button	Vesari's own data folder	No

That last row is the one to watch: a fetched cover is pointed at from the app's data folder, not written into your music. To make it permanent, embed it from the tag editor or save a cover image into the album folder. A CD rip does both. See Where Vesari Stylus keeps your files and settings.

If a cover arrives and then goes again, see Artwork I fetched vanishes after a rescan.

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