How OmniGrowl can help you improve your iTunes artwork

Have you ever wanted to improve your iTunes album artwork, but haven't wanted to spend hours (or days depending on the size of your collection) working on it in a dedicated way?

Have you wanted to see album cover artwork while listening to iTunes without disrupting your normal workflow by switching to iTunes or even having the iTunes window take up any space?

Then you may be interested in taking just a little time to set up OmniGrowl and GeekTool 3 and some hot keys for scripts included with OmniGrowl.

OmniGrowl 4 significantly improves the tools that make this possible. Imagine this workflow:

Album artwork is displayed on your desktop. An unobtrusive character in the track info indicates whether the artwork was downloaded from the internet or is already in iTunes. You can glance at it, and if it came from the internet, with a key press you can add that artwork to the album currently playing. You continue your work, enjoying your music, and over time improve the artwork in your collection.

This works especially nicely if you have a secondary monitor, so you can see the album art without losing screen real estate for it.

Although setting this up takes a little time, it's very easy to do. Basically you have to:

• install GeekTool 3
• create 2 "geeklets": an image geeklet called "itunes art" and a shell geeklet called "itunes info"
• enable GeekTool support in OmniGrowl
• optional: install your choice of several hot keys programs and attach a few scripts to hot keys
• run OmniGrowl as usual and enjoy!

Please read OmniGrowl as an iTunes artwork suite for more information.

Note: As OmniGrowl 4 makes this even easier than before, this blog entry has been updated on May 5, 2010 in anticipation of the release of OmnIGrowl 4.0.