Ever want to grab the cover art for some album? Or have you ever wanted the full-size icon from an iOS app? Or the cover image from a movie or TV show? A podcast's icon? Ben Dodson hosts an excellent web-based tool that lets you do all that and more: The iTunes Artwork Finder.
Usage is about as simple as it gets: Pick a category, enter your search term, set the geographical region, and click Get the artwork.
Note that this only works for things available from the iTunes Store in the specified region, so you can't use it to find cover art for that digitized copy of some obscure record you found at an underground music store in New York City back in 1973.
Also note that if you have your own web site, you can host your own artwork finder, as Ben has made the code available for all. I wouldn't recommend making it publicly available, though, unless you have bandwidth to spare—a single search for "Friends," for instance, returned about 25 high-resolution images.
Here's how I set it up on our family's web site; it's really easy to do, and it works great:
- Download the zipped archive from GitHub.
- Create a new folder on your server. I called mine getart.
- Upload the two files (php, js) from the archive into the folder.
- Add basic HTML tags (html, head, body) to the stub of HTML shown on the GitHub page, and save it as index.html in the same folder. If you like fancy and have time to spend, go ahead and pretty it up with CSS and layout. I just left it bare.
That's all there is to it; you can now look up artwork by loading http://yourdomain/getart (or whatever you called it) in your fave browser.