When iTunes was updated to display TV show artwork per season, it left many people with a problem. Sure, iTunes retrieved and displayed artwork for the TV show as a whole, but often it couldn’t for the individual covers of different seasons. Sometimes this is because TV shows that have been ripped to your hard drive don’t have the correct metatags to allow iTunes to recognize the exact season. Other times it’s simply because the artwork isn’t available for one reason or another.
In such cases, to avoid having gaps in your pristine iTunes TV show artwork, there are two main solutions to this:
1. Use an application to add metatags to your iTunes TV shows collection
There are several applications you can use to do this. One of the best on Mac is VideoDrive which allows you to search online for metadata and cover art and automatically number season and episodes of TV Shows so that iTunes retrieves the correct cover art for each show. It’s very easy to use, has a slick interface and has tons of customization and preference options:
Not quite as slick but fairly effective on Windows is MetaX which uses the TagChimp and the IMDB to retrieve metatags for your movies and season episodes. Most useful however is the fact that if you really can’t find a season cover, it allows you to take a snapshot of a frame from the DVD (such as the main menu on your DVD which should be similar to the season cover).
2. Find the artwork manually
There are many ways of doing this. One is simply to use Google Images which is usually powerful enough to find all but the most obscure TV shows and series:
However, there may well be obscure or lesser known shows where you struggle to find the exact cover art for. There are several sites than specialize in compiling TV show cover art which may be able to help.
One of them is GetVideoArt which is a beta project where users can upload and share cover art for TV shows, films and albums. You can often find different cover art for the same seasons on here due to the fact that it often differs from world region to region.
There are of course many other sites that offer TV show artwork. Amazon is one of the most obvious and you can also try the Internet Movie Poster Awards site which also has a section for TV show artwork.
