Will rhythmbox download album art?

Out of the box, rhythmbox has the ability to extract coverart from art embedded within tracks themselves (for example mp3 files), or from MusicBrainz & LastFM websites.

For the coverart to appear you need to play a track and then the Coverart Plugin takes over and fetches the artwork.

There are a few issues with this:

• you have to play each track individually to download coverart
• you have no control over where the coverart is downloaded.

From Rhythmbox v2.97 and above you can manually change coverart by dragging and dropping covers onto the coverart area. I've explained this approach in this Q&A:

The rhythmbox coverart browser makes downloading covers very simple.

First - you can select multiple albums or all albums and the plugin will download all the covers for you automatically i.e. you dont need to play individual tracks (but you can also continue doing this as well if you so wish):

You can manually update all Rhythmbox versions since RB2.96 using the inbuilt Google powered cover finder:

Further more, you have the ability to tailor where you want coverart to be downloaded from - and there are more providers possible than the default rhythmbox coverplugin:

All covers downloaded by the coverart browser plugin are visible also through the coverart icon shown in the toolbar.

See the installation instructions described in the links below.

Linked Question: