Music streaming services automatically display album art, but you're on your own with local music collections. You should take the time to grab the album art for your music—besides being enjoyable to look at, having proper CD covers helps you easily identify music tracks and makes your collection feel complete.

Below, we round up some of the best sites to download high-quality CD album cover art. You can use them to perfect your MP3 collection or just collect your favorite CD cover designs.

1. Album Art Exchange

Album Art Exchange

Album Art Exchange is a site wholly devoted to high-quality images of album covers, making it a great resource for anyone interested in album art.

On its About page, the founder mentions that he started the site because so much of the CD cover art online was of terrible quality. These images are often plagued with JPEG compression, poor contrast, scratches, and scans where someone didn't even take the time to remove the CD insert from its case.

As a result, you'll find excellent album cover images here for over 700,000 albums. Just search for a specific album (or artist) to find what you're looking for. Each one displays the image size, dimensions, and user rating, so you can pick the best one for your needs.

Click the Advanced button on the search page to change sorting options. You can also use the Change Layout option at the top to display more albums per page.

Register for a free account using the button at the top-right, and you can even upload your own images to contribute to the collections of others.

2. Discogs

Discogs Album Page

Discogs is one of the go-to resources for music data online. It's a huge database that collects information about artists, albums, record companies, and much more. It's no surprise, then, that Discogs collects album art images as well.

Get started by searching for your chosen album or artist using the box at the top. After you select an album, you'll see the chosen image for it at the top-left of the page. Select More images to see other pictures related to that album, such as the CD's back cover, inserts, special editions, and regional variants.

Overall, the images on Discogs aren't as high-quality as Album Art Exchange. However, the site has images for singles, compilations, and rarities as well. If you're interested in those, plus images aside from the main album art, there's a lot here for you.

3. MusicBrainz

MusicBrainz Yours Truly Album Page

Discogs has a lot of information, but MusicBrainz surpasses it in some ways. It's like an IMDb for music, as it allows you to see every place that a song has appeared, track music by tags and categories, find a band's internet presence, and much more.

This information can be overwhelming at first, but finding album art with MusicBrainz is pretty straightforward. Search for an artist or album name using the bar at the top-right and you'll see plenty of results for it. Select the album you're looking for, and it will likely bring up several versions from different regions of the world.

You can select a regional release if you like, but this typically isn't necessary. Instead, you can access a high-quality version of the cover art on the right side of the main album page. And if you're interested, most of the data this site has cataloged is available to download for free.

4. Google Images

Wolf and Raven Album Art Google Images

Still can't find the CD cover art you're looking for? Try turning to the world's largest image search platform. Chances are that you can find the art for pretty much any record, since Google Images searches the whole web.

You'll have to be particular when looking for album art on Google Images, as you're likely to find poor-quality photos. You might want to set the Size option under Tools to Large to avoid tiny versions of album art files. Google Images doesn't show image dimensions on the thumbnails anymore, so you'll have to click an image and then mouse over it on the right side to check the size.

Google Images may find some photos from the above sites, so it's up to you which search interface you prefer. Try advanced Google search tricks if you need to refine your searches.

5. Try Desktop Tools to Download Album Covers

If you only want to grab a few album covers, the above methods work well. But they're too slow for downloading dozens or hundreds of CD covers for your collection. When you need to add art to a lot of tracks, you should use a desktop tool dedicated to the task.

One of the best tools for this is MP3tag, which makes it easy to edit music metadata, including album art. See our full guide to MP3tag for how to use it.

There are plenty of other choices for album cover downloads, though. Have a look at MusicBrainz Picard or Album Art Downloader if MP3tag doesn't do the job for you.

6. Amazon

Amazon Paramore Album Page

It's also possible to download high-quality CD card from Amazon, but this method is unreliable. We include it as an extra option, but you're better off using one of the above in most situations.

As you probably know, Amazon sells tons of music. As part of this, the site usually features high-quality artwork on each album page. Simply search for the album that you're looking for and you can access its art. However, you'll have to jump through a quick hoop to get a decent-quality version of the album art.

First, select Streaming or MP3 from the list of formats on the album's page. This will load an Amazon Music page for the record.

Amazon Music Access Streaming Copy of Paramore Album

Here, right-click the art and choose Open image in new tab to load a copy of the image. You'll get a URL like this:

https://m.media-amazon.com/images/I/51NMynsS4JL._UX358_FMwebp_QL85_.jpg

To enlarge this, you'll need to remove everything between the periods, while keeping the .jpg ending. For example, the above URL should look like this:

https://m.media-amazon.com/images/I/51NMynsS4JL.jpg

This will give you a 500x500 copy of the album art, which isn't amazing, but might be the best you can get depending on the album. There used to be another method for getting album art up to 1400px square from Amazon, but it no longer works.

You may wish to try a similar method with another site that sells music online.

It's Easy to Find Quality CD Album Covers

This list of resources makes it easy to find CD cover art for any album in your collection. Whether you're looking to add proper art for a rare release or just want to collect high-quality versions of your favorite album art, these sites will deliver what you need.

Beyond album art for records, why not try creating cool art for your own playlists?