How to Fix Album Artwork on Your iPhone When It’s Changed or Corrupted During an Upgrade

I recently upgraded from an iPhone 13 to an iPhone 16 Pro, and when I synced my new iPhone to my iTunes library for the first time, at least half of my album artwork was corrupted on my phone.  What do I mean by corrupted?  Well, the artwork for some of the albums (the album covers) changed from the correct album artwork to random artwork from various other albums.  Here's an example... this is the Taylor Swift Folklore album, but it was showing the cover for the Trolls soundtrack.

When it should have looked like this:

The Gracie Abrams album, The Secret of Us, had artwork for a Frank Sinatra album, the Zach Williams album, There Was Jesus, had artwork for a Lil Jon Christmas album, my favorite album by Phil Wickham, Hymns of Heaven, had artwork for R. Kelly (cringe) and so on.  And these are just a few examples of hundreds... thousands?

All of the changes were totally random, and some of my albums weren't corrupted at all.  Some of the newly updated (wrong) album covers were for albums that I don’t even have on my phone (R. Kelly, I’m looking at you), which was REALLY strange.  So I have no idea how this happened, why it happened, and if it will happen again.  Apparently, Apple is aware of the situation, but they want people to use their streaming services, so they haven’t made it a priority to get it fixed.

The weirdest part was that the artwork was only wrong on my phone.  It was all still correct in iTunes (thankfully).  If it hadn’t been correct in iTunes, then this fix I’m sharing today wouldn’t have worked.  So before you try this "fix," do check your album artwork in iTunes first to make sure it's correct.  To see if the album artwork is correct in iTunes, you can do the following:

 

1. Open iTunes
2. Click on “Albums” on the lefthand side
3. View all of your album covers

 

Or if you want to check a specific song, you can do the following:

 

1. Open iTunes
2. Click on “Songs” on the lefthand side
3. Right click on any song in your list
4. Click “Song Info”
5. Click “Artwork” at the top
6. This is where you can delete artwork or manually change it should you want to

 

While this is definitely a first world problem to have and it’s not the end of the world, I knew it would drive my organized-everything-in-its-place-Type A-self insane.  INSANE.

Music is everything to me.  I love it.  I listen to it constantly.  I rarely use streaming services and instead I primarily listen to it from the music app on my iPhone AKA my personal library.  I have created dozens of playlists over the years – I have one for every mood, every situation, various years of my life, various people in my life (Brian, Jacob, Olivia), etc.  I even have some that were transferred and created from burned CDs from the early 2000s. 

So, you can probably see how important it is to me to see the actual album artwork for Folklore when I’m listening to Folklore by Taylor Swift.  As a matter of fact, I care so much about having the correct album artwork for each album in my library, that I started the very large task last year of going through every single album in my iTunes library and uploading the album artwork for all of the blank ones that were on there.  (Many of them were blank because they were songs that were downloaded from Limewire back in the day – oops!  LOL – and some of them were blank because they were ripped from CDs and the artwork didn’t transfer.)  I spent hours upon hours last year, and I’m still only about halfway done with that task.

Anywayyyy, when I synced my iTunes library after getting my new iPhone and saw that all of my hard work had been undone in the blink of an eye, I was SO MAD. 

The first thing I did was ask my technology guru – my husband, Brian – and he had no idea why or how that could have happened.  Since he was clueless, he and I both scoured the internet for a fix. 

Apple was unhelpful (surprise, surprise), and while there were many suggestions for workarounds, all of the workarounds had negative consequences, too.  Sigh.

Brian finally found a thread on a discussion board on Apple’s website, and I owe all the credit to someone with the username “kronius” on there for solving my problem.

The fix sounds scary… it requires deleting all of your songs from your phone (EEEEK!) but it worked and it fixed all of the album covers!!!!

A few things to note before I provide the step-by-step instructions:

 

1. None of my music has been purchased from Apple.  It is all purchased from Amazon, ripped from old CDs, or downloaded from Limewire way back.  So, this fix works for all music downloads… not just Apple purchases.
2. The album artwork was only incorrect on my phone, NOT in iTunes.  All of the album artwork was correct in my iTunes.  If the album artwork is incorrect in iTunes for you, then this fix will not work for you.
3. I had 6,181 songs on my phone at the time that I did this, so my music library was very large, but this process only took 45 minutes from start to finish, and 38 minutes of that was syncing the songs back to the iPhone.
4. I had 62 playlists on my phone at the time that I did this, and they were all recovered and restored on my phone at the end of the process.  In other words, you will not lose your playlists.
5. iTunes keeps a record of your listening stats… it shows how many times you have listened to a song, and the date and time each song was last played.  Going through this process does not mess up your stats either.  You will not lose them. (This was important to me, too.)

 

Okay, are you ready for the fix?!

 

Here is the step-by-step process to correct the album artwork on your phone:

 

1. Open iTunes
2. Connect iPhone to computer
3. Select the iPhone in iTunes and go to “Music”
4. Uncheck (turn off) “Sync Music”
5. Click “Apply” – this will remove all music from the iPhone (this only takes a few seconds)
6. Close iTunes
7. Locate and delete the iTunes Album Artwork Cache directory (mine was here: C:/Users/[My Username]/Music/iTunes/Album Artwork/Cache)
8. Disconnect iPhone from computer
9. Reboot iPhone (turn it off and turn it back on)
10. Restart computer
11. Open iTunes
12. Connect iPhone to computer again
13. Select the iPhone in iTunes and turn “Sync Music” back on
14. Click “Apply” – this will put the music back on the iPhone and the album covers will now be corrected (this took 38 minutes for me and I had 6,181 songs and 62 playlists at the time)

 

It seems like a lot, and it seems a little scary, but y’all, it was SO EASY and I was actually in shock that it actually worked as I always have terrible luck with technology.

So, if you’re unfortunate in the technology department like I am, and this weird thing happens to you, I hope this helps!  Share with your friends!

And for you regular readers, I realize that this isn’t something that I typically post about, but I wanted to post about it today because a) I want it archived somewhere in a space that I own so I can access it easily should it happen again in the future, and b) I want to help others who may be having the same issue and can’t figure out how to fix it. 

Because nobody has time to manually correct hundreds/thousands of album covers.

Have a great day, y’all!