How do I read album artwork using python?

python object mp3 id3
Sheldon picture Sheldon · May 30, 2011 · Viewed 8.7k times · Source

In my searches I have found that there are a few libraries that might be able to do this by reading ID3 tags. If so - which one would be the best to use? I don't plan on writing any data just reading.

Also I'm trying to make this app as portable as possible so the least amount of dependencies would be a huge bonus.

Would appreciate some advice. Thanks.

Answer

zeekay picture zeekay · May 30, 2011

I'd recommend mutagen, it's a pure python library with no other dependencies and it supports a lot of different audio metadata formats/tags (MP3, FLAC, M4A, Monkey's Audio, Musepack, and more). To extract artwork from an ID3 v2.4 MP3 saved with iTunes:

from mutagen import File

file = File('some.mp3') # mutagen can automatically detect format and type of tags
artwork = file.tags['APIC:'].data # access APIC frame and grab the image
with open('image.jpg', 'wb') as img:
   img.write(artwork) # write artwork to new image

Related questions

How to print instances of a class using print()?

I am learning the ropes in Python. When I try to print an object of class Foobar using the print() function, I get an output like this: <__main__.Foobar instance at 0x7ff2a18c> Is there a …

Read More
Calling a function of a module by using its name (a string)

What is the best way to go about calling a function given a string with the function's name in a Python program. For example, let's say that I have a module foo, and I have a string whose content is "…

Read More
How do I determine the size of an object in Python?

I want to know how to get size of objects like a string, integer, etc. in Python. Related question: How many bytes per element are there in a Python list (tuple)? I am using an XML file which contains size …

Read More