I made a Mac app that fixes the blank and cropped artwork in Kontakt 8's browser
Body (one paragraph per line, paste as is or rough it up in your own words first, since polished prose from a first-time poster reads as marketing):
I have 220 libraries in Kontakt and a lot of them were showing soft or missing artwork, so I wrote an app to sort it out. Sharing in case it is useful to anyone else here.
Why it happens: Kontakt wants two images per library, a 420x316 tile and a 1280x212 banner. Where the tile is missing it falls back to MST_artwork, a 134x66 thumbnail from an older Kontakt, and stretches it to fill 420x316. On my install 74 of the 195 products in the Instruments tab are running on one of those stretched thumbnails, and 2 have nothing at all.
Kontakt Artwork reads the library list from Kontakt's own database so it only shows you real libraries, marks the ones genuinely missing something, and lets you make proper artwork for them. Search for a picture or drag your own in, position it, install. If you want to go further there is a small layer editor: mirror or multiply a picture across the banner, drag a box round lettering to lift it off or remove it, add your own name in any system font, backdrops, vignettes, sticky notes. It also reorders the Default view, which Kontakt gives you no way to do, and backs everything up to iCloud or Dropbox so a new Mac comes back exactly as you left it.
It archives the original files before it changes anything, so it is fully reversible, and it does not go near your samples. Notarised by Apple. macOS 13+, Kontakt 8, pay what you want from $3.
https://allgoodfolks.com/kontakt-artwork
If a moderator would rather I did not link here, say so and I will take it out. And if anyone at NI wants the detail on the fallback behaviour, I am happy to write it up properly, since I suspect most library developers have no idea it is happening to their covers.
