Album art tagging vs linking?

Hello helpful people
I am trying to find out if there is a way to determine which of my tracks have the album art linked to the file, as is the case for music bought directly from the Apple Store and where iTunes' "Get album artwork" functionality is used to download the album art.
Before I fully understood the mechanisms that control and manage album art, I was using a combination of two methods to add it; 1) iTunes' "Get album artwork" and 2) by scouring the web for decent cover art images (or correct ones where Apple's were wrong) and dragging them into the "Album art" box of the appropriate tracks in iTunes (and thus into the files' tags). This means that I now have a mixture of methods at work, and besides simply being irked by the inconsistency of it, if I were to ever divorce myself from iTunes I would lose all the cover art for those tracks and albums for which the art is merely linked, and not incorporated into the files themselves as a tag.
I would like to be able to identify all the tracks with linked album art, and so be able to select them all and tick the "Album art" box as blank, thereby deleting all the linked instances of album art. I appreciate that this leaves me with a lot of work to replace the now deleted art, but given the growing number of programs out there that will scour the web and automatically download album art I think it is not an insurmountable task.
Hmmm... Would simply deleting the iTunes/Album Artwork folder do the trick? The actual image files that are the tracks are linked to are stored in there, right? So if I deleted this folder I should essentially have deleted all the instances of linked artwork in my library... right?
Afterthought: This whole issue might also be moot if there is software that will download the album art and save it in the file tags, and will override the linked iTunes album art in cases where it exists. Does anyone know of any suitable program? I have my library rigged up to play on both my Mac and PC so it could be either a Windows or Mac program.
On a more discursive note, I'm surprised there isn't more on this issue out there. I did a fair bit of searching and came up with nothing, though I have to assume this has been discussed and I just missed the mark. It seems to me a pretty frightening prospect that if I had relied on iTunes for all my album art I would have to give it all up and start from scratch if I ever wanted to leave iTunes for something else. I don't think users are aware of how shackled they are by this aspect of iTunes, and it makes me wonder if this was implemented intentionally for that purpose, or if it was genuinely a matter of opitmizing iTunes' code and functionality.
Thanks!

iTunes has nothing to do with it.
When MS developed the WAV format, they chose not to include tags for album artwork (or much else).

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I am having a problem too, just in how to link the album art to files.
I play some songs, they fine, others not, wish i knew how to set the linking so I could manage the album art manually by linking to certain mp3 files. IE two or three songs come from the one art img.
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bfollowell wrote:
I even unchecked the box under My ipod that says "show album art" (maybe mistakenly thinking that was referring to synching album art.
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Message was edited by: brian163

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