My basic question is simple - is there a way to NOT have WMP download album art to my computer? I don’t want it sitting around. I don’t need it. The ONLY reason I use WMP for anything is that it is the only player that my Philips Mp3 player will sync with. I don’t want the album art on my player, and I don’t want it in my library.
Question part two - is there a way to get rid of the artwork already loaded into my music folders? I can’t even find a reasonable way of viewing the files much less deleting them. My Explorer folder options are set to view hidden files, yet I still can’t even see these images.
This is version 11, by the way. Running with XP on an IBM Thinkpad. I have gone through all the options and help files I can find, and have unchecked every “download additional media information” boxes that I saw. It still does not seem to help. I apologize if I’m missing something obvious. I’m inexperienced with WMP on purpose, and now it seems to be haunting me.
Do a search for *.jpg in your “My Music” folder, making sure to go to the advanced search options and search for hidden files, and delete all the results (perhaps after browsing them to make sure they’re all actually album art).
But I must say, the size of those JPG files is absolutely miniscule compared to the size of your music files. They’re just not worth worrying about. If you sweat stuff this small, you probably oughta stop using Windows entirely. Try searching your hard drive for “thumbs.db” some time.
I realize that the space taken up by these files is virtually negligible, (ha ha - get it? Virtually? Sigh …) I just would rather not have them around. Most annoying to me is the way that they show up on some reports and not other. For example, when I do a search in my music folder as galt suggests, the album art files from media player DON’T show up, even when set to search in hidden files and folders. In other places, such as the file browser in Nero, they do. (And yes, I tried deleting them from there - no luck)
That was actually the first place that I checked, in the tags on the music files, but like I said earlier, they show up as separate files in places like the Nero file browser, so I knew they were separate. I just couldn’t figure out how to get to them.
I actually found it earlier this morning - the box in folder options labeled “Hide Protected Operating System Files” needed to be unchecked. Stupid media player was trying to pass off their album art jpegs as system files.
