Create Album Cover is a free desktop tool that turns any photo into a 500×500 album cover, with the artist and album lettered right on it.

What It Does

Music players want a square cover image in every album folder, and most of the pictures worth using aren't square, aren't the right size, and don't have the artist's name on them. Create Album Cover fixes all three at once: drop in a photo, type the artist and album, drag the text where you want it, and save. What comes out is exactly 500×500 pixels, which is what your music player is looking for.

Making a Cover

Open a photo. Click Open Photo, or just drag an image file onto the window from File Explorer. JPEG, PNG, BMP and GIF all work.

Type your text. There are three lines—Album Artist, Collection and Album. Use as many as you like; a line you leave blank simply doesn't appear. Collection is there for box sets and series, where the individual album belongs to something larger.

Style each line. Every line has its own Font and Color buttons, a Shadow checkbox to help the text stand off a busy photo, and a dropdown to align it left, center or right. The slider underneath moves that line up and down the cover. Everything updates in the preview as you go, so you are always looking at the real thing rather than a guess.

Save it. Click Save Cover. JPEG is offered first, since that is what music players generally expect, but you can choose PNG instead. Whichever you pick, the file that lands on disk is 500×500. Next time, the dialog opens on the same drive and folder you used last, already set to the same format.

Fitting the Photo

Your photo is almost certainly not square, so Photo Layout decides what happens to it:

• Fill—scales the photo until it covers the whole square and crops whatever hangs over the edges. This is the usual choice, and the default.
• Fit—scales until the entire photo is visible, leaving margins above and below (or left and right). Nothing is lost, but you see the backdrop around it.
• Stretch—distorts the photo to fill the square exactly. Rarely what you want, but occasionally it is.
• Tile—repeats the photo at its original size. Good for patterns and textures.

Behind the Photo

If your photo is a PNG or GIF with transparent areas—a cut-out portrait, say, with no background—then something has to show through. That is what the Behind The Photo panel is for. Click Color to pick a solid color, or Image to put a second picture back there. The same backdrop also fills the margins when you are using Fit.

Darken top lays a shadow over the backdrop, strongest at the top and fading away toward the bottom. A little of it makes pale lettering far easier to read without touching the photo itself.

Underneath the preview, the program tells you whether the photo you loaded actually has any transparent areas. This is worth reading. A picture named something like "portrait transparent.png" quite often turns out to be a flattened preview with the checkerboard pattern painted into it, and no real transparency at all—in which case no backdrop you choose will ever show, and the message will say so.

A Whole Shelf at Once

The Batch button works through an entire music folder. Point it at a folder of albums and it visits each subfolder in turn, 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 a finished Cover.jpg inside. A leading year, as in "1973 - Dark Side", is trimmed off the album name automatically. Any folder with no usable picture is skipped and reported at the end.

Whatever fonts, colors and positions you have set up carry over to every cover it makes, so a shelf of albums comes out looking like a matched set.

It Remembers

Fonts, colors, text, positions, layout, backdrop, the darkening, the folder and format you last saved to, and even the photo you had open are all remembered between sessions. Close the program in the middle of something and it opens again exactly where you left it. If a photo has since been moved or deleted, it is quietly dropped rather than complained about.

Download

If you'd like to try Create Album Cover, grab the installer below. It needs 64-bit Windows and nothing else—everything it depends on is inside the installer, so there is no runtime to chase down first.

• Download Create Album Cover