How to show episode artwork in podcast apps and yes, even in Apple Podcasts.
Thank you for joining me for The Audacity to Podcast.
I'm Daniel J. Lewis.
You already know that your podcast needs top-level podcast cover art to look great in all the
podcast apps and directories.
You can also further enhance the experience for your audience, create promotional assets,
reinforce your branding by making unique artwork for each episode. But you need to compensate
for how each app might display the episode image, especially Apple Podcasts. If you have
ever tried to work with episode artwork, you probably have experienced the Apple Podcast
problem or you've probably seen other podcasters ask "how do I get my episode artwork to
show in Apple Podcasts?" Because, spoiler alert, Apple Podcasts doesn't work with their
own standards sometimes. So in this episode I'll share three places where your episode
artwork can go, and the last one is a special workaround for Apple Podcasts. If you find
this episode helpful and you think it might help other podcasters, then please share it
by tapping or swiping inside of your app, or go to theaudacitytopodcast.com/episodeartwork.
That's also where you can go to see a couple of the screenshots that I have for you that
might help you understand and see how some of these things display.
That's at theaudacitytopodcast.com/episodeartwork.
Now before I get into these three places, some quick tips for making episode artwork.
There are a bunch of different images that you can make for your podcast.
Now I've done an episode all about seven different types of images that you can make.
I highly recommend you go back and listen to that episode because it can be really beneficial
to even have seven different layouts of the same basic image so you can use those in multiple
contexts and in multiple ways. But for this episode we're focusing on one. That is your
episode artwork that's a square that will be attached to this episode and display inside
the podcast apps. So here are a few quick tips for making that effectively. First, follow the
same spec as podcast cover art. That is 1400 by 1400 up to 3000 by 3000 pixels. It must be exactly
square, not one pixel off, exactly square. It needs to be in the RGB color space. Use JPEG or PNG.
Here's a quick hack to that. JPEG generally for things that are like photographs or look photographic.
PNGs for things that are more like illustrations where there's a lot of solid color in them. For
For example, The Audacity to Podcast cover art uses PNG because that compresses it better
than a JPEG since there are a lot of solid colors in my cover art.
And the file size needs to be smaller than 512 kilobytes, preferably closer to 200 kilobytes
if you can.
Then keep your branding as consistent as possible.
Think about your fonts, colors, layout, icons, the general mood of the design and such.
that consistent from episode to episode, there can be some slight variation obviously, but consistent
episode to episode as well as consistent from episode cover art to your podcast cover art. So
that if someone looks at both of them they can see that they're related and so that if someone looks
at your episode artwork they can see that it is clearly for your podcast. And one of the ways to
do that is with the next tip, include your logo or podcast name but it doesn't have to be as prominent
in your episode artwork as in your podcast cover art.
Then focus the artwork, this is your episode artwork, on the episode's title and simple
imagery that supports that title and the episode's content.
Then ensure the most important parts can be understood if you shrink the artwork to about
one inch square or 2.5 centimeters square.
But most episode artwork will actually display almost as wide as your smartphone screen depending
on the podcast app, the device someone is using, and such.
And last tip, remember that this artwork will show most prominently in the now-playing interface
of the podcast app, possibly on the lock screen, especially on newer phones running iOS 16
and later, and possibly on attached devices like a smartwatch, a TV, or an in-car display.
So now that you have your episode artwork following these tips, there are three places
you should put it to make it show up in your podcast apps.
Again, follow along with the notes or share this episode out at theaudacitytopodcast.com/episodeartwork.
Number 1, ID3 Tags.
Audio files can have metadata embedded in the files through what's called the ID3 tags.
This includes the title, author, chapters, URLs, episode numbers, other text, and relevant
to this episode, images.
And as a little aside, I couldn't find that ID3 actually stands for anything.
Everything I looked up for what does ID3 stand for, everything defined it as ID3 is the metadata
tags for audio files.
No one actually defined what ID3 stands for.
So maybe it's like Ulysses S. Grant where the S doesn't actually stand for anything.
Did you know that by the way?
So it's not a typo if there is no period after the S because that S doesn't stand for anything.
Neither does ID3 stand for anything, but it's what we call it, so let's run with it.
After that aside though, Overcast and several other PyCast apps use the image inside your
ID3 tags.
And some automations such as Zapier, Repurpose.io, Webpage Embedded Players, and certain importers
into other platforms for other automations or playback or display, many of those also
use the image in the ID3 tags.
Which kind of makes sense because then they're getting all of the data from the file instead
of having to look at the feed even though they are already looking at the feed.
But some of these systems need all of that processed in a different way.
So they are pulling the image from the ID3 tags.
Any ID3 editor should let you add at least one image.
And I do recommend that you add only one image.
Don't try to add multiple images to the ID3 tags.
There are some great ID3 editors out there.
So in the order that I recommend, first there's ID3 Editor from PA Software.
This is $15.
It's for Windows and Mac OS and it, I think, was the best $15 I've ever spent in podcasting
because it saved me so much time in this simple thing.
It lets you easily copy tags from one file to another as well as save an ID3 tags template
so you can easily load that onto your podcast.
This is especially helpful if you host multiple podcasts like I used to several years ago
where I would have multiple episodes every week and I had different templates that I
could load into this.
Now it's only $15 if you buy it directly from PA Software.
I don't earn anything from that.
I've been recommending that for years.
I'm also a licensed reseller for ID3 Editor.
So if you'd like to purchase it from me for the same price and support what I do,
I have a link to that in the notes.
Same $15.
It works on Windows and Mac OS and it's worked for many years and it seems to be a perpetual
license too.
You don't have to renew it.
I bought it maybe 10 years ago and I'm still using it.
They've updated it since then and it's getting a little better and a little better.
It just works really well and it's reliable.
It's actually now my double click behavior when I click on an MP3 is it opens an ID3
editor instead of an audio player.
$15.
I think it's a great investment.
If you want to buy it from me, I've got the link in the notes or you can buy it directly
from PA Software and I earn nothing from recommending that from them as I've been recommending for
many, many years.
The next thing you can use is iTunes on Windows, OS X, and older versions of Mac OS up to 10.14.
Or you can use Apple Music now to do the same thing if you're on Mac OS 10.15 and later.
There's also MP3 Tag which is free for Windows and it's $19.99 for Mac OS.
I don't know why there's that price difference, but that's how they did it.
If you're going to spend $19.99 on MP3 tag, get the better app which is $15 and that's
ID3 editor.
But you might also already have the ability to add tags to your MP3 files through your
podcast hosting provider.
Like you can do this in WordPress if you use Blueberry.
You can do this in Libsyn.
You can do this in several of the podcast hosting providers that they can let you automatically
embed stuff like your cover art, your notes, your title, the episode number and such into the ID3
tags as part of your publishing process. So look into those tools that you're using because you
might not need an ID3 editor or you might. And my top recommendation is that one ID3 editor from
PA Software which you can buy from me or buy directly from PA Software. This should be the
first and most important place for your episode artwork. Even if you don't make unique images for
each episode, make sure your episodes always include an image and that would be if you're
not doing unique episode artwork, it should be your main podcast cover art in the ID3
tags. That ensures total compatibility. And I've seen some things where on certain apps,
even if there is podcast cover art in the RSS feed, when playing an episode in certain
places it won't show any cover art whatsoever because it's not in the ID3 tags.
So for that extra compatibility and to ensure your images display even if it's only your
podcast cover art, make sure it's in the ID3 tags.
But that should also be if you use episode artwork, put it in the ID3 tags instead of
your podcast cover art.
That's number one.
Number two, RSS feed.
There are two RSS tags that can hold your episode level artwork.
The iTunes colon image tag from Apple's iTunes namespace, and yes that is one place
the iTunes brand still exists.
And then there is the new modern podcast colon images tag from the Podcasting 2.0 podcast
namespace.
You'll see these, especially the legacy tag from the iTunes namespace, at the top
level for your whole podcast, called the channel level by the way.
And they can also be used for your individual episodes, called item level.
Please link out to the cover art that's hosted somewhere, like maybe on your podcast hosting
provider, maybe on your website, something like that.
But it's a link out to where your podcast cover art is for that episode or if it's on
the channel level, the top level of your podcast, then it's your overall podcast image.
Like with all things Podcasting 2.0, the podcast colon image tag from the podcast namespace
of Podcasting 2.0 lets you do more than the iTunes image tag.
Instead of only linking to one image, you can specify different images for different
sizes.
Why would you want to do that?
Instead of letting some other platform do the image resizing and then worrying about
whether the image is very readable at different sizes, you could design an image that's,
for example, maybe only the icon to display whenever it's 150 pixels wide or smaller.
Or an image with the title and the icon if it's displayed at 600 pixels wide.
Or an image with the title, the icon, and more on it at 1200 pixels wide.
That's what the Podcasting 2.0 podcast colon images tag can do.
And there might be other features in the future too.
And do note that the iTunes namespace tag is iTunes colon image singular and the Podcasting
2.0 image tag is podcast colon images plural because you can attach multiple images to
it. And I've got the links to the documentation in case you're wondering how to do this.
But your podcasting 2.0 compatible publishing systems should let you do this anyway, or
it will eventually.
So those are the two standard ways to add episode images, your ID3 tags and your RSS
So, now let me interject with the Apple Podcast problem because despite these things being
standard and one of them even being the Apple Podcast spec that's been around for many
years, it's Apple's own proprietary namespace doesn't make the image show inside of Apple
Podcasts on macOS or on iOS devices.
It still doesn't work!
The irony there doesn't escape me and I don't know why Apple has chosen not to support their
own tag that they continue to recommend.
Yes, their documentation still encourages using it.
Here are some quotes from the documentation.
If you look at it, and I've got the link in the notes if you want to look at their
RSS spec, they show that there is the iTunes image tag for episodes and it goes under the
items then because it's an item level or episode level and it says the episode artwork.
You should use this tag when you have a high quality episode specific image you would like
your listeners to see. But they won't see it in Apple Podcasts. It goes on and says
a couple other things and also says depending on the device, listeners see your episode
artwork in varying sizes. No they don't. Not if you're using Apple's own tag. You
can read the rest of the excerpt from this. They give some guidelines on how to make that
image. But the point is, at least right now, that doesn't work. For some years now, the
only places your episode artwork showed in Apple Podcasts were in episode search results.
So if you were searching for your podcast, you'd see the list of episodes that match
that search term. It also displayed on the Apple Podcasts web page preview and when playing
an episode from the catalog, but not from the library. So people who weren't your
audience could see your episode artwork, but not your audience. But apparently sometime
in 2022, maybe with the release of iOS 16 or one of its updates like 16.1, Apple ended
Even these behaviors. We used to wonder which behavior was the "bug" – was it not
displaying the episode artwork to followers? Or was it displaying episode artwork at all?
Now it seems that displaying it at all was the bug. So now it seems the only place Apple
displays the episode artwork is on the Apple Podcasts episode webpage preview. That is,
If you go to theaudacitytopodcast.com/applepodcasts that takes you to my Apple Podcast listing
in your browser, if you don't let it open Apple Podcasts and then you click on one of
the episodes still in your browser, that's where you would see the episode artwork in
some form of Apple Podcasts.
And I've got a screenshot of that in the notes for this episode, but that's not in the actual
Apple Podcasts app.
That's on the web page, but not in the app.
Why?
I don't know.
Until Apple Podcasts fixes this, if they ever do, there's one trick I figured out to still
get episode artwork to show in Apple Podcasts.
Yes, it does work.
And I'm not referring to the trick of changing your show-level artwork every time you publish
a new episode.
That's what No Agenda does.
But while that might seem to work, it does that only for the latest episode and then
that leaves old episodes to show the same image in Apple Podcasts and any app that ignores
episode level images would then show the latest episode's image instead of that older episode's
image or the overall podcast cover art because you're changing it every time to match the
latest episode. So that's not the hack I'm talking about. The hack I'm talking about,
or trick we could say because it's not really a hack, things were designed to work this
It is number three, chapters.
While Apple Podcasts does not currently support its own iTunes image tag for episode artwork,
it does support chapters and chapter images.
In fact, I use this for this very section of the podcast you're listening to right
now.
Look at your podcast app, especially if you're using Apple Podcasts, but look at your podcast
app and you will see that the image right now, if your app supports chapters, is different
from my normal podcast cover art with the red and black cover art of the Audacity podcast.
The way I'm accomplishing that is with chapters.
Chapters are a way of dividing your content in podcast apps.
This allows your audience to quickly see your content outline, letting them skip to or away
from sections and they can also see a title, an optional image, and an optional hyperlink
for each chapter. And for Pycasting 2.0, which already has a better version of chapters,
I've submitted a proposal that I link to in the notes for this episode if you want
to support it, to expand the chapters to support rich content like image galleries and basic
formatted text. So instead of seeing only a title and a single image for a chapter,
You could see multiple images and swipe through them while you're listening to that chapter
and you could see more links under a chapter.
Just like sometimes when I say a major bullet point in my outline and I have several links
under that, my proposal is that the chapters would be able to display multiple links, not
just the one link per chapter and one image per chapter.
But that aside, like episode artwork, chapters are a way of enhancing the experience for
your audience.
And you can use chapters as a trick to force Apple Podcasts to display the episode artwork.
You can use a different image for each chapter and Apple Podcasts and other apps will switch
to that image while the chapter plays.
And even on iOS 16 where episode artwork or podcast cover art now displays much more prominently
and beautifully on the lock screen, that does change when the chapter image changes.
And then when you play a chapter without an image, then podcast apps will switch back
to the main podcast cover art.
And some podcast apps might fall back to that episode level artwork through the other means,
the ID3 tags or the RSS feed, if the current chapter doesn't have its own unique image.
Now if you have only a single episode image, there are three ways you could force this
to display in Apple Podcasts and other apps that have this same kind of trouble using
chapters. But each one of these three ways has some drawbacks. The first way is to make
only a single chapter for your whole podcast episode and make it include the episode artwork.
This can work, but the presence of any chapters, even if there's only one chapter, will trigger
the chapter interface in podcast apps. This becomes wasted space and potentially confusing
to see only a single chapter. It's like giving you the notes to a speech and the whole
outline is merely the word "speech". You don't want to make only a single chapter
for your podcast. That is trying to hack the system. And when people try to hack the system,
things that work often get taken away. So don't do that.
The second thing you could do is put the episode artwork in every chapter. Since a chapter
without an image will revert to the podcast cover art, you could insert the same image
into every chapter and your audience would never see it change. Take this episode for
example. I have six chapters in this episode so I could put the same image in all six of
those chapters so that it would force that image to display in Apple Podcasts across
the entire episode. Even though the chapters are changing and technically it's changing
the image, your audience wouldn't see the image change because it's the same to them
even though the image is technically changing in the background. But this is a little cumbersome
to do. If you're already creating the chapters, it's really not that much extra work to
put the image in every chapter, but it is something to remember to do and you might
forget a chapter here or there. And it also unnecessarily bloats the mp3 file because
each chapter's image takes up more space. So if I put an image in only chapter 1 of
this episode, that takes up a certain amount of space. And if I put this same image in
all 6 chapters of this episode, then that's going to take up 6 times as much space. Now
we're not talking about a difference of tens of megabytes, but it might be a difference
of a megabyte or more, especially depending on how big your image is and how many chapters
that you have.
My images tend to be around 100 to 150 kilobytes, so it's not all that much of a difference,
but if you have a lot of chapters, or if you have a much bigger image like a 512 kilobyte
image that's half a megabyte and you've got 20 chapters, you could potentially be increasing
your file size by 10 megabytes just by putting that same chapter image in all 20 chapters.
This also isn't the best way to do it.
The third way, the way that I recommend, is a hybrid of these previous two methods.
And that is to put the episode artwork in only the first chapter or first couple chapters.
This will cause the episode artwork to display when your audience first starts playing the
episode and for as long as that first chapter continues.
The reason why I say first chapter or first couple chapters is your first chapter might
be really short.
For example, the first chapter for this episode and most of my episodes is intro and it's
sometimes as short as 30 seconds.
So if I wanted that episode artwork to display longer than the first 30 seconds of the episode,
I could put the same image in the second chapter and then it would display until that chapter
is over and then it would revert to displaying the podcast cover art for the overall show.
This won't take as much space as repeating the same image across all your chapters, but
it also means Apple Podcasts will revert to that show-level podcast cover art after moving
past that first chapter or the first couple chapters.
And maybe you're okay with that.
Now while this tip focuses on Apple Podcasts, I suspect it would also work for other apps
that support chapters but not episode artwork.
Because it does seem that any app that supports chapters, and a lot of apps do support chapters,
the legacy MP3 chapters and some of the Podcasting 2.0 apps especially are supporting the new
Podcasting 2.0 standard for chapters.
It seems that, at least in my testing, any app that supports chapters does also support
the chapter images, which makes sense because one of the whole reasons to make chapters
is to be able to put multiple images in there.
We used to call that enhanced podcasts, but now they're in MP3 and we can add chapters
to MP3s.
So that's the trick to make it display inside of Apple Podcasts. If you're listening on
Apple Podcasts you could see that for this chapter or I've got a screenshot in the
show notes at theaudacitytopodcast.com/episodeartwork.
So then, is episode artwork worth making? It seems that I've been asking a lot of
is it worth it questions lately. You need to keep in mind it's possible a podcast
app or directory still won't display your episode artwork even if you implement all
three of these methods. And to be thorough, I do recommend you do all three, at least
the first two, if you don't want to mess with chapters. But then you'll miss out
on the Apple Podcast trick.
But besides that, some of your audience might never even see your beautiful episode artwork
because their device screen is off or covered, like in their pocket, the whole time they
listen to your episode. So is it really worth the effort to make individual artwork for
each episode if your audience might not even see it? Yes, I think it is. First, because
it enhances the experience for your audience. If they see that episode artwork, it's a
nice little touch on top of things. And second, because you can use the episode artwork along
with several other layouts of the same design that I've talked about in my previous episode
about podcast images, you can use that same artwork to make your podcast look better when
you embed it and promote it.
For example, I take the exact same artwork I put in my episodes and I post it on my Instagram
profile @thedanieljlewis to promote my new episode.
And that's the same episode artwork.
So if I didn't have that episode artwork, then I couldn't promote the latest image so
easily and beautifully on Instagram because I wouldn't have an image to use.
Please definitely check out my previous episode for resources on how to create your episode
images.
I listed a bunch of resources there, some free things, some paid things, some do it
yourself, some people you could hire, and more guidance on how to create different podcast
images whether for episodes or for your overall podcast.
I highly recommend that episode as a resource for you.
I linked to that episode "7 Kinds of Podcast Images for Marketing and Branding" that's
linked in the notes for this episode.
And please do share this episode if you found this helpful and you know of other podcasts
who need this information as well.
Share that, a tap or swipe away inside of your app or go to theaudacitytopodcast.com/episodeartwork.
Now that I've given you some of the guts and taught you some of the tools, it's time
for you to go start and grow your own podcast for passion and profit.
I'm Daniel J. Lewis from TheAudacityToPodcast.com.
Thanks for listening.
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