iTunes dropping album artwork

Try turning on your external HD before you boot the OS. If your drive does not have a power switch, unplug it and plug it back in again. Wait a few seconds for the HD to fully start up and then power up your computer. Once the OS is booted up, make sure you see the drive mounted in your file system and then start itunes. There is a good chance that this will fix your problem.

I had this problem when one song was selected. During playback artwork was shown only for one song. I fixed it by marking all songs and pasting artwork in properties.

Kijanki: Are you referring to an iTunes properties location? Not sure what you are referring to there.

Zd542 I responded to your suggestion with a "Thank you I will try that" but I did not see my post in the thread - so, Thank you, I will try that! (again).

Puerto, You can open properties by right clicking and selecting "Get Info". You can do that to one song or more if you mark them. Sometimes only one song has artwork. I don't know why, perhaps this song was highlighted/selected when I was dragging artwork into album (blank) icon. Strangely, when I click on "Get info" for the album artwork/icon it has none.

Another confusing thing in Itunes is fact that I cannot see my albums as tiles. Remedy for that is to set "Smart PlayList" with "Genre contains xxxxx" where I set xxxxx to genre like "Classical" etc. Later I added "- " in front of the name to have them appearing together (not mixed with other playlists). Playlist still allows to change properties but does not allow to delete - good protection.