A better system for different sized/aspect ratio of album art

[akalucard]

It's hard to explain what I'd love to see, so I made a picture to kind of explain it.  My ideal world would be that it would center any non "square" album art and fill in the dead space w/ a color from the album art, similar to how musicbee fills in the track list based on the album art.  If it would be too much work, I get it.
 Just my OCD talking! (and if this already exists and I'm just blind, I'm ready to learn)

[phred]

I do this manually and once I got the hang of it, it takes less than a minute.

I use Corel PaintShop Pro, but I would think PhotoShop could do it. I just checked out GIMP which definitely can do it. It's free and open-source. As is Paint.net.

It involves a few steps. Basically paste the image into a new application window noting the size of the largest dimension. Open a new 'canvas' sizing it so that it is square with the largest dimension from your image. For example your image is 840x400, create the new canvas at 840 x840. Copy the image to the new canvas and save it. Then reopen it and bucket fill the blank areas with the color of your choice. I use a color picker and try to match one of the colors in the image. Save it and you're done.

Here's an example of a black and white photo that I use.

[akalucard]

Thank you for the reply phred!  That is definitely a solution, but my collection is quite large, and this would be a pretty massive undertaking.  But it's good to know there is an option if it comes to that!

[phred]

my collection is quite large, and this would be a pretty massive undertaking

I consider my collection large (37,000+ tracks spread across almost 3, 000 albums) but the advantage for me is that I started using the Corel app quite some time ago. So I don't need to do any wholesale fixing of artwork.

[Mr. Trev]

It's hard to explain what I'd love to see, so I made a picture to kind of explain it.  My ideal world would be that it would center any non "square" album art and fill in the dead space w/ a color from the album art, similar to how musicbee fills in the track list based on the album art.  If it would be too much work, I get it.
 Just my OCD talking! (and if this already exists and I'm just blind, I'm ready to learn)

I'll totally +1 this

Another thing to try if you're willing to do some work - along the lines of what phred is doing (Since I use artist view the images are conveniently saved in their own folder. Embedded artwork would be way more complicated)

Irfanview (free program BTW) has a canvas size edit function. One of the methods to resize the canvas is to pick a fixed aspect ratio - 1:1 would the choice (iview auto-centres the image as far as I can tell). You can pick what colour for the canvas - either using the typical colour palette, or by clicking on the image itself. If your lazy like me, then the just leave the canvas colour black and use the option to fill new space with blurred image (I used the full 199 blur). I tested this on a few images and it doesn't look too bad.
Now here's the best part… Iview has a batch processor. Once you decide on your canvas size options, just select the folder with your images and grab a beverage until its done. (images already at 1:1 are basically unchanged)

Now I should point out I haven't actually tried the batch processing myself - I only discovered it after reading this post, but I do have a pretty massive chunk of images that could be "fixed" myself. This is the simplest (read lazy) method I've found so far, so I may just make a backup of the image folder and give it a whirl

[akalucard]

@phred - I agree I should have started something like this years ago when the collection was manageable. (approaching 1 million songs, and have tons of special video game music / anime stuff that love to not have square dimensions.

@Mr. Trev - yeah I actually have infranview for some simple context menu conversions or resizes.  I'll look into what you've said, and see if that will somehow work on my layout.  Thanks guys

[Goblet]

+1

[vzell]

+1

[hiccup]

-1 for MusicBee improvising on adding coloured bars.

I prefer to have MusicBee displaying the artwork as it is.
When I notice artwork not being square I would like to be the one making decisions on what to do with it.

+1 for having the artwork centred not only horizontally but vertically too.

[psychoadept]

+1 for centering, I'm fine with the colors but also fine without

[The Incredible Boom Boom]

+1 for centering, could go either way on filling in colors