MP3 Album images vs. JPEGs in Picture Viewer

I would like to know the answers too

The only way that I can think of is to put pictures on one card and mp3's and album art on another. The gps will see any and all jpg's no matter where you store them.

Album Art is discussed in several topics:

http://www.poi-factory.com/node/1402

http://www.poi-factory.com/node/20268

Gary,

Thanks for the response, but I'm not having any problems getting the album art to display in the MP3 player.
My problem is that the album art also appears in the picture viewer. I'd like to figure out a way so that the album art only appears on the music player and not in the picture viewer.

Thanks,
Steve

Steve - I believe the reason your album art is appearing in the picture viewer is because you don't have the ablum art embedded in the id3 tags of the songs.

Open the SD card and you should see a jpg image for each album. Those jpg files need to be deleted and the album art needs to be inserted into each song's id3 tag. You can use one of the free programs in the link above.

If he didn't already have the album art listed in the properties, it wouldn't be showing properly for the music. It just tells the music what artwork is associated with the song -- it's a pointer.

You realize that you don't have to show the album art in the player. I realize that some people feel the need to have the artwork to fully appreciate the song, but if you are using it while driving, do you really look at the artwork?

You have run into one of the problems with Garmin's operating system. It doesn't pay any attention to folders. It will display ALL of the .jpg files it finds anywhere in the system memory. The same holds true for .mp3 files. It will find and play ALL of the .mp3 files.

The main difference between .mp3 and .jpg files is that you can write a 'playlist' for .mp3 files and tell the unit to play only the files on the playlist. It would be nice if you could do the same thing for .jpg files.

Jack j

I do have a 760 and a 680 and mp3 music on sd cards with album art for each of the songs and they don't show the art in the picture viewer at all, what I did is:

1.- download the music to Itunes
2.- open the mp3 file and assign album art to each song accordingly
3.- download my music to sd cards
4.- insert the sd card into the slot for the nuvi

And that is it

Frgg- Thank you for the info. I may have to try going through that again, but I'm pretty certain that this is the way I assigned the album art to the songs in the first place.

I double-checked my SD card, and there are no jpeg files on it. In fact, the only files on the file at all are the mp files.

Thanks,
Steve

Album art is often in hidden files. Do you have your computer set to show hidden files? You can check under MyComputer/Tools/FolderOptions/View, and make sure the radio button is selected to Show-Hidden-Folders-and-Files.

Yes, I checked that, and I do have the 'show hidden files' radio button turned on.

Thanks.

Well, I know that album are CAN be embedded directly into the mp3 file, but I can't understand how a jpg viewer would display it. I assumed that the reason FRGG's unit does not show his album art in the viewer was that he had embedded art and you didn't, but if you don't have the art on your unit as jpg files, I'm at a loss. There must be some real music experts on this site, and I'm hoping one of them can step up and explain what is going on.

I have a "folder.jpg" in each of my .mp3 directories, and yes they do show in the picture viewer. I use a single "folder.jpg" per directory because it cuts down on the space used i.e. 40K .jpg and 1500 tracks in 150 albums = 150x40K versus 1500x40K if embedded.

However if the .mp3 player will use any .jpg in the folder, regardless of name, (which some players will) then you could try renaming all your .jpg's to "zzzfolder.jpg" and then they would probably appear at the end of the picture listing, where you could ignore them?

I can't try this myself at the moment, but it may be worth a shot.

Embedding the album art into the ID3 tag seems to work with my 750 but it does increase the size of the mp3 files. Because of the way Garmin ignores folders and looks for all jpg files, it appears to be the only way to ensure the album art doesn't appear in the picture viewer.

But adding the album cover to 1500 files, one file at a time, is going to take more time than I want to spend.

Jack j

Try the free MP3 tag editor at:

http://www.mp3tag.de/en/

If you go into the "Extended Tag" info you can import and embed a folder.jpg into every file in the directory in one go. Just select all the files and then select the .jpg you want to embed. Very capable, and pretty simple to use, program for any tagging exercises you want to do.