Is it possible to add itunes:image to an Atom feed with enclosures?

Question

I have an Atom feed for my blog. I recently had some audio content that I wanted to publish, and I added audio enclosure link tags for each entry that has associated audio. Even though I realize that RSS is the canonical format for podcasting, iTunes is able to digest the Atom feed just fine and download the audio enclosures. However, I wanted to add an image for the resulting podcast (iTunes sort of treats this as album art), but my attempt at adding an itunes:image tag didn't seem to work.

I tried this:

<?xml version="1.0" encoding="utf-8"?>
<feed xmlns="http://www.w3.org/2005/Atom" xmlns:itunes="http://www.itunes.com/dtds/podcast-1.0.dtd">
  <itunes:image href="http://files.mcgeary.org/avatars/ryan-mcgeary-headshot-black-grayscale-600.jpg" />
  <title>...</title>
  ...
  <entry>...</entry>
</feed>

Is what I'm trying to accomplish possible or is converting my feed to RSS the only way to get podcast album art in iTunes?

Answer 1

after some experimenting and googeling, it seems to me that itunes does not use <itunes:image> or <image> images from podcast feeds. images embedded that way seem to be only used once you submit your podcast to the itunes store - then itune store fetches and uses them. so if you don't want to submit your feed to the itune store, even converting your atom to an rss feed won't help.

luckily, there seems to be a solution: embed your artwork into the actual media files.