Cleaning up 'folder' and 'cover' JPG files.
November 10, 2015 in album art by Dan Gravell
There are two approaches to storing album artwork in a music collection. You can either embed artwork inside the music files themselves (my personal favourite approach) or you can store separate image files with a well known name in the same place as the constituent tracks of the album.
It's not an either-or choice. Different music players work in different ways, and so whilst your lounge streaming system may show embedded album artwork, your car stereo may only work with separate image files. As a result you may need to store both; hence why bliss currently always saves a separate image file.
But for many people, you really, really know that you don't need separate image files, and so if you have a load of folder or cover JPEG files, how can you delete them?
Here's how, for each principle operating system...
Windows
The easiest way to remove a load of similarly named files is using Explorer. We'll use Windows 10. First, open Windows File Explorer and find your music library:
Select the music folder, now click inside Search at the top right of the window. Type folder.jpg OR cover.jpg:
The file explorer should reload to show all folder.jpg and cover.jpg files. Now it's a simple case of selecting them all (Ctrl-A or Home > Select All) and then deleting them:
That covers Windows 10. The process is similar, with a slightly changed UI, on Windows 7 and later. Use Windows Explorer to search within the music folder, select all, then delete.
It's also worth mentioning a potential gotcha for some Windows systems. Some versions of Windows Media Player have a habit of marking folder.jpg files as "system" files and hiding them also. If this is the case on your system you may also need to make sure Windows Explorer is showing hidden and system files.
OS X
You can easily find cover and folder image files using Spotlight. Spotlight can be accessed from the top-right of your desktop, on the Menu bar:
You can see I've typed in the search string: (cover.jpg OR folder.jpg) kind:Image. That should return all cover and folder JPGs. To batch delete these, click Show All in Finder:
... and then select all the files, right click and select Move to Trash!
Linux
Linux batch deletions are best done with a bit of command line magic. Open Terminal and change directory to your music folder:
cd ~/Music
Find all the image files with the find command:
$ find . -iname 'cover.jp*g' -o -name 'folder.jp*g' ./Various-Abbey_Road_EP/cover.jpg ./The_Jesus_and_Mary_Chain-Psychocandy/The_Jesus_and_Mary_Chain/psychocandy/cover.jpg ./Belle_and_Sebastian-If_You're_Feeling_Sinister/cover.jpg ./CD1/cover.jpg ./CD1/folder.jpeg ./Pulp-Different_Class/cover.jpg
Check the list, then if you're happy you can delete them with -delete:
$ find . -iname 'cover.jp*g' -o -name 'folder.jp*g' -delete
I hope that run-down was helpful if you wanted to batch delete album image files! I'd really like to add a capability to bliss to remove separate image files, so if this would be useful for you please vote for it!
