How to Display Album Art in VLC

Many people embrace the convenience of digitally distributed music but lament the loss of the physical media itself – namely, being able to hold an album and look at the cover while listening to a song. The free, open-source VLC Media Player gives users the best of both worlds by displaying album art for whatever song is currently playing. Enabling automatic album art downloads in the program's options will find and display album covers for most music, but for obscure artists, you may need to manually add album artwork.

Click the "Tools" menu, click "Preferences" and then click the "Interface" button on the sidebar. Click the "Album Art Download Policy" menu and select "When Track Starts Playing." You can also select the "As Soon as Track is Added" option to automatically download album art for all songs that you load into your playlist. Click the "Save" button to close the preferences window.

Right-click a song in your playlist and click "Information" to show the song's metadata window. Right-click on the album cover box and click "Add Cover Art from File." Select an image file and click the "Open" button.