Album art image won't display on Galaxy S3

[Spyguy]

I've been adding high-resolution album art (720x720) to my phone's music library and the results have been stunning. The Samsung Galaxy S3 has a display that is 720 pixels wide, so there is no re-sizing of the image on the phone when it displays the full-screen album art. I've done about 3 dozen albums so far and all have worked except ONE. It's like the phone is rejecting the image and refuses to display it. This is the image:



I edited and saved the image in Photoshop, just like all the others. The first time I tried it, the image was saved at a high JPG optimization, so the file size was 386KB. Not a big deal; I have other images larger than that and they displayed fine. When the image didn't display, I figured that maybe there was some oddity in the JPG compression sequence that was preventing it from displaying. So I re-created it at a lower optimization setting, resulting in an image that was 211KB. That didn't work either. I tried deleting the entire album's folder and rebooting the phone and adding the art again. Nope, still didn't work. I've tried clearing the data file from the music player app, but that didn't help either.

Later, I was having some issues with my micro-SD card, leading me to think it was a card error. So I bought a new 64GB Class 10 SanDisk Ultra Plus micro-SD card. I added the album folder and the art image to the new SD card and it still doesn't work. Clearly, this image is possessed!

Any ideas as to what could be the problem?

[Spyguy]

Well, I finally solved the problem. What had me confounded was the fact that I had previously deleted the folder that had this album (music and art) off my phone, and then even installed and formatted a new micro-SD card, all to no avail. I had also used file manager to delete all the album art thumbnails that Android creates automatically, but that hadn't helped. But after testing with some other album art images that already worked for other album folders, I realized that the problem wasn't with the image itself. It had to be a problem related to the album directory.

So digging around on the internet, I found an old post on a Motorola forum talking about the Android Media Store Application. This is basically a database that tracks all the media (images, audio, and video) on the Android phone. Here is a description of the MediaStore Class:

The Media provider contains meta data for all available media on both internal and external storage devices.

So I deleted the album art thumbnails again, stopped the Media Store Service on my phone, and then cleared the Media Store data and cache. Then I rebooted the phone and waited a little while for the Media Store to re-scan my phone and repopulate the database with metadata. Voila -- success!