Windows 7: Can't see album art in Windows Explorer, pls help

thanks for your replies........

but my problem isn't solved yet......

You're going to have to provide more information... like a screenshot of MP3Tag showing one of the "problem" MP3 files that isn't showing the cover art.

I just ran my own experiment (although I don't normally use Windows Explorer to manage or view my music collection). Works perfectly for me.

I do NOT use imbedded album art inside of the tags in my MP3/FLAC files, because there's no reason I can justify for the duplication of imbedded JPG art into each music file for the same album. So normally I would only have "cover.jpg" as an external album art file in the album folder and no imbedded art duplicated into each music file's in that same album folder. But I did just that in my experiment, to see what would result.

(1) Initially, Explorer showed only the "cover.jpg" thumbnail, and nothing for each MP3/FLAC file in that folder:



(2) Then I used MP3Tag to imbed the "cover.jpg" album art in that folder into EACH TAG (of each music file, MP3 and FLAC) in that folder. So now I had both imbedded album art in each tag, as well as the same "cover.jpg" album art in the folder. Results looked perfect:



Note that Windows Explorer does not support tags in (or even play) FLAC files, so they still appeared as having no art. But if I look at those files with MP3Tag the imbedded album art is there, since FLAC tags DO support imbedded art and MP3Tag does support FLAC tags completely.


So... this is obviously how things SHOULD work. Everything works perfectly, and Windows Explorer shows the imbedded album art inside of ID3 tags (for MP3 files) even if it doesn't show imbedded art inside of FLAC tags.

Now, looking at one of these MP3 files which currently has imbedded album art using MP3Tag, it looks like this. Do your files look the same, showing the imbedded art??

The icons you show in your capture2 do not look like the icons for "music files". They look like the icons for "playlist files".

Are you sure you're looking at the correct folder, and that it has been populated properly with MP3 files and not M3U files??

See my own screenshot above, of my own folder containing MP3/FLAC files. Note the Winamp icon for the MP3 files... which is NOT the Winamp icon for M3U (playlist) files as yours shows.

Unfortunately your screenshots for capture1 and 2 chopped off the bottom of each icon, so I can't see the file names underneath nor can I see the folder names. That would have been very informative.

Okay, so I believe I've got a real fix for you. I've been dealing with a similar issue in Windows 7 for this same exact problem. Basically what I've come across is that something happened to the registration in Windows that altered the ability of these files to display thumbnails. The way I fixed this issue was to locate a resource online that would repair just the file extension with a registry hack.

For example, since I use Windows 7 and could not see thumbnails for some of my mp3 files, I went here:

Default File Type Associations - Restore

and pulled down the reg file that would re-establish default settings for mp3 files. After downloading and running the registry file, I rebooted and after logging back in to windows, I found that I could see all my mp3 files with the thumbnails properly in place. I'm actually having the same problem with AVIs as well. I'm going to try this method again to pull down the reg file for AVIs and get thumbnails back for these types of files as well.

I've got a good feeling this will do the job for you.

its simple open windows media player press ctrl+o

now you see a explorer to select music

go to mp3 containing folder & open it change view as large icon

(NB: open all mp3 folder and change the then go slowly top to bottom of folder)

OP when I had a similar problem I followed this