Create Album Cover has a command line as well as a window. Anything you would sit and click your way through, you can also hand to a script—or to an AI assistant—and have it done without a window ever appearing.

Basic Syntax

"Create Album Cover.exe" [photo] [-Artist=text] [-Collection=text]
       [-Album=text] [-Layout=Fill|Fit|Stretch|Tile] [-Backdrop=what]
       [-Darken=n] [-Output=file] [-Batch=folder] [-Reset] [-Help]

The one bare argument—anything without a leading dash—is the photo to build from. Note that the program's name contains spaces, so it needs quoting on the command line. The examples below assume you are in the folder it was installed into, which is %LOCALAPPDATA%\Programs\Create Album Cover — it installs for you alone and so needs no administrator rights.

Parameters

Parameter names are case-insensitive, so -artist and -Artist are the same thing. Values containing spaces must be quoted: -Artist="Nat King Cole".

What Gets Remembered

This is the part that makes the command line worth using. Only the switches above can be set from a script—but fonts, text colors, shadows, alignment and the vertical position of each line have no switches at all. Those come from whatever you last set up in the window, saved under HKCU\Software\Namtira\Create Album Cover.

So the intended way to work is: build the first cover of a series by hand, getting the fonts and colors exactly how you want them, and close the program. Every command line after that inherits the look, and you only have to name what changes —usually just the album title.

Settings are applied in three passes: the built-in defaults first, then whatever was saved, then the command line. A switch you name always wins. And a run that uses -Output or -Batch never writes settings back, so no amount of scripting can disturb the setup you arranged by hand.

Examples

Build One Cover

"Create Album Cover.exe" photo.png -Artist="Nat King Cole" ^
    -Album="Big Band Cole" -Output=Cover.png

Writes a 500×500 Cover.png and exits. No window appears. The fonts, colors and text positions come from your saved settings.

A Whole Series, Same Look

"Create Album Cover.exe" cole.png -Album="After Midnight" -Output=1.png
"Create Album Cover.exe" cole.png -Album="Just One Of Those" -Output=2.png
"Create Album Cover.exe" cole.png -Album="The Very Thought" -Output=3.png

Three covers that match each other exactly, because everything except the album title is inherited rather than restated.

Put a Color Behind a Cut-Out

"Create Album Cover.exe" singer.png -Backdrop=Maroon -Darken=55 ^
    -Artist="Nat King Cole" -Output=Cover.png

The transparent areas of singer.png become maroon, shaded darker toward the top so the lettering stands out.

Put a Photo Behind a Cut-Out

"Create Album Cover.exe" singer.png -Backdrop=stage.jpg ^
    -Output=Cover.png

Same idea, but a second picture shows through instead of a flat color.

Show the Whole Photo

"Create Album Cover.exe" wide.jpg -Layout=Fit -Backdrop=#1E2A44 ^
    -Output=Cover.png

Nothing is cropped. The bands above and below the photo take the backdrop color.

Do an Entire Music Folder

"Create Album Cover.exe" -Batch="M:\Nat King Cole"

Visits every album subfolder, finds a picture already sitting there, takes the artist from the parent folder's name and the album from the subfolder's own, and writes Cover.jpg inside. A leading year, as in "1957 - Love Is The Thing", is trimmed off the album name. Folders with no usable picture are skipped and listed at the end.

Open the Editor, Ready to Go

"Create Album Cover.exe" photo.png -Artist="Nat King Cole"

With neither -Output nor -Batch, the window opens with the photo loaded and the artist filled in, so you can nudge things before saving.

Every Artist Folder (PowerShell)

Get-ChildItem "M:\" -Directory | ForEach-Object {
    Start-Process "Create Album Cover.exe" -Wait -NoNewWindow `
        -ArgumentList "-Batch=`"$($_.FullName)`""
}

Works through an entire music library, one artist at a time. The Start-Process -Wait matters here: see the note below about why PowerShell otherwise doesn't wait.

Exit Codes

Progress goes to standard output and problems to standard error, so a script can tell the difference, and redirecting either one to a file works as you would expect.

Waiting For It

Create Album Cover is a windowed program that happens to be able to run without its window, and Windows treats those differently from ordinary console programs. This is invisible most of the time, but it matters in scripts.

Command Prompt waits for it to finish, so the examples above behave the way they read.

PowerShell does not. Calling it directly with & starts it and moves straight on to the next line, which means you see no output, get no exit code in $LASTEXITCODE, and—worst of all, in a loop—launch every copy at once instead of one after another. Use Start-Process -Wait, as in the loop above, whenever you care about any of that.

Notes

A photo or backdrop image named on the command line that cannot be found is reported. One restored from saved settings that has since moved or been deleted is dropped quietly instead, so an old setting can never stop the program starting.

Whatever you ask for, what comes out is exactly 500×500 pixels, which is the size music players are looking for.