iTunes Crashes when I add Artwork to an Imported Video

I was getting ready to go on a short trip so I was loading up iTunes with some videos that i ripped. That way I would have something to watch on the plane and in the hotel. I’d done this before but I had never changed the artwork so that it would look like the movies that I purchased from the iTunes store.

For those of you who don’t know how to add artwork to your videos, just right click (Cmd-click) on the video in the iTunes. Select “Get Info” and then click on the Artwork tab. You can drag and drop a picture from the web to the box there or you can click the add button to navigate to an image stored on your hard drive.

So of course I use Google image search to find an appropriate image. I drag it over to the artwork frame under the Artwork tab of the Get Info dialog box. When I click OK, within a few seconds I would get the spinning beach ball of death. iTunes was not responding. So I would force quit the application and reopen it. The movie would then be corrupted. I would see a white box where the poster frame was displayed. If I tried to play the movie, iTunes would crash.

Turns out the solution is very simple – patience. Apparently it takes a few MINUTES for the artwork to be added to an .mp4 file. By contrast it only takes a few seconds to add artwork to an .mov file.

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