Typically, beets stores album art in a “file on the side”: along with each album, there is a file (named “cover.jpg” by default) that stores the album art. You might want to embed the album art directly into each file’s metadata. While this will take more space than the external-file approach, it is necessary for displaying album art in some media players (iPods, for example).
This plugin was added in beets 1.0b8.
To automatically embed discovered album art into imported files, just enable the plugin (see Plugins). You’ll also want to enable the FetchArt Plugin to obtain the images to be embedded. Art will be embedded after each album is added to the library.
This behavior can be disabled with the auto config option (see below).
The embedart plugin provides a couple of commands for manually managing embedded album art:
The auto option lets you disable automatic album art embedding. To do so, add this to your config.yaml:
embedart:
auto: no
A maximum image width can be configured as maxwidth to downscale images before embedding them (the original image file is not altered). The resize operation reduces image width to maxwidth pixels. The height is recomputed so that the aspect ratio is preserved. PIL or ImageMagick is required to use the maxwidth config option. See also Image Resizing for further caveats about image resizing.