More questions about how folders contents are displayed

Wondering if you have had some time to think about this. Now the desktop folders are displaying a blank page. Happened all of a sudden and not all of them do it.

I did. But I'm not sure what I was supoposed to do once I logged in as built-in Admin. It set up the new desktop and in order to view the music folders I had to go to my user account and then everything still looked the same.

I would really like to figure out why what I posted above is happening. For whatever reason the folders were showing two artworks (e.g. Adele in first post) and then they showed one artwork (e.g. Adele in my 2nd post). Now any music I add shows two pieces of artwork and no matter what I do I can't get it to show one. Like it should and did in the past.

I'm not sure if this helps but its what I have done to make my music libraray look better. If a folder contains a folder.jpg file you will just see the one thumbnail view. It's a hidden file. If the folder doesn't contain the folder.jpg file then you see multiple thumbnails based on what files are in the folder. I made my own folder.jpg files for each on the main folders in my music library.

That way I get just the one picture of the artist instead of all the album covers.
Windows media player will usually create one for each album based on the album art. If it can't find any album art and the original files didn't come with any you won't see a picture for a thumbnail, it will just be the default which I believe is the page with a turned corner. What can also happen if you download the music online, is it may come with the front cover, back cover, track list, etc as pictures. If there is no folder.jpg file those images will be displayed as thumbnails for that folder. I have no use for those files and delete them if present. I like my albums displayed like this.

You are probably on to something. First question I have is how do you create folder.jpg and then what do you do with it?

I actually have seen folder.jpg along with my music files when I look at the music that I backed up to my external HDD so it is there somehow for some of my music. But why it's there for some and not others I am not sure. I just checked my external HDD and the ones that show two picturse the same don't have folder.jpg. How did I add it to some and not others?

Here's what I do related to music. I have standardized it for the last month or so and that is why I am confused as to why everything doesn't display the same. I use iTunes. If it downloads artwork I copy that artwork and manually add it to files. If no artwork downloads then I find it online and copy it to the files. So either way I am manually adding the artwork. This way the artwork will always be with the music even if I have to reload my library into a new iTunes. Much of my music has downloaded iTunes artwork and that is why they don't display a picture but as mentioned I have done it this way for about a month and even started converting those that just had downloaded pictures.

But as pictured in my posts some are showing up as one picture others as two. And I honestly haven't done anything different. Now it seems as if everything is showing up as two pictures where a few weeks ago I could get it to display one picture.

Using 311 as an example. Today I manually added the artwork to Universal Pulse and it shows two pictures both the same. The other two albums I added a few weeks ago and they show one. The artist folder shows the two albums that have 1 picture so there must be something to the folder that is showing 2 pictures that makes it not display in the artist folder.

The Adele I show above somehow changed from 2 to 1 but I can't figure out how.

So maybe I should do what you do but I have 65GB of music so to go back would be hard but going forward I could do it...if I understood .

What I usually do is Google the artist, look for a good picture to use, and down load it. If it's not a jpg file I'll use something like infanview to convert it to one. I may also edit out any thing I don't want. Sometimes I'll just edit an album cover and remove the text, etc. Once I have the picture I want, I rename it folder.jpg, move it to the folder and make it hidden. I have media player set to NOT "Retrieve additional information from the internet". I don't want it changing anything. I edited all my mp3 files with mp3tag to add any missing album art. Something I noticed while doing that was that you can have two or more images for your album art. I deleted everything except the one I wanted. I would think that could cause multiple thumbnails instead of just the one. The one thing to keep in mind is if there is no folder.jpg, windows will just look for images in any and all sub folders to display. I didn't like the multiple album covers etc so I slowly over time edited things the way I wanted them. I've been doing it this way since windows XP.