---
title: feat: find cover art in subfolders, and re-cover every placeholder at once
status: closed
labels: []
created: 2026-09-14
closed:
---
Two halves of the same problem: art that was sitting right there and never got used, and albums stuck on a generated placeholder with no way to retry them in bulk.

Art is now found one level below the album as well as beside the tracks. That is how scans arrive -- a Scans/ or Artwork/ folder holding front.jpg -- and it used to be invisible, so an album whose real sleeve was in the staging folder was filed with a placeholder and the art stayed in staging for ever. Art beside the tracks still wins outright; the subfolder is only a fallback, so a stray back cover in extras/ cannot displace the real front cover. A candidate found in a subfolder says where it came from, so the list reads "Scans/front.jpg".

intake library re-cover --placeholders runs the fetch again for every album still on a placeholder, sorted by artist and album, reporting each one. Only a confident match is taken: replacing a placeholder with the wrong sleeve is worse than keeping the placeholder, so anything less is left alone and counted separately.

Both paths go through one function that writes the cover, embeds it in the masters, records the change and rebuilds the library copy, because the library has its own cover.jpg and its own embedded picture. Replacing the archive art without that left the placeholder list clear while the copy people actually stream still carried the placeholder.