The Art Institute of Chicago Has Put 50k High-Res Images Online

Re:The Art Institute of Chicago Has Put 50k High-Res Images ... by veridies on Sunday November 11, 2018 @05:48PM (#18429195)

Is there any sort of organized, searchable index of artwork online? It's sort of a massive undertaking, but it's the kind of thing that a wiki would be good for, and there have been a handful of different museums which have made these kinds of sets available.

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Re:The Art Institute of Chicago Has Put 50k High-Res Images ... by jmkd on Sunday November 11, 2018 @06:59PM (#18429558)

Google Arts & Culture [1] aspires to this, and does a great job to a certain extent, however not at scale or in the long tail. For their own reasons institutions have resisted mass uploads to Google - despite the theoretical marriage of CC licences and G A&C non-profit contractual agreements. Art Institute Chicago has been a partner with Google since 2012 yet today we see only ~1% of their artworks on G A&C. [1] https://artsandculture.google.com/

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Re:The Art Institute of Chicago Has Put 50k High-Res Images ... by exodust on Sunday November 11, 2018 @07:51PM (#18429797)

Unfortunately the images cannot be downloaded from Google Art Project (original name).

It's irritating having to jump over complicated hurdles to get a seamless hi-res image capture from Google Arts. It requires some messing about, but I previously managed to grab about 100 high res images, but it took ages and was not easy. They printed out nicely in the end though, so was worth it.

A simple download link as seen on artic.edu would be appreciated but sadly I don't see Google providing this because they want people to remain on Google, logged in, while they view art.

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Re:The Art Institute of Chicago Has Put 50k High-Res Images ... by jmkd on Monday November 12, 2018 @05:56AM (#18431811)

I was deeply involved in the project for 5 years and the reason you can't download from it is because museum partners don't want you to. All the image security you find there comes from partner requests. If it's irritating, don't blame Google.

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Re:The Art Institute of Chicago Has Put 50k High-Res Images ... by exodust on Monday November 12, 2018 @07:26PM (#18437267)

> All the image security

The word "security" can't be applied when the measures in place are "don't include a download link".

There is no "security" when the image displays perfectly fine on the screen. It just takes a few screens worth of panning, screen-grabbing and assembling a complete image in Photoshop. After a few rounds, I had a rather efficient workflow going using macros. Most of the artwork I was interested in was between 50 and 100 years old, and completely for personal use - printing out hi-res versions on paper of my choice (matte, never glossy like almost all commercial art prints.)

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Re:The Art Institute of Chicago Has Put 50k High-Res Images ... by fandango on Monday November 12, 2018 @10:36AM (#18433178)

No. Don't shift the blame to other parties. Google decided to play ball with all these external requests. Google owns the project. Google is the one to blame.

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Re:The Art Institute of Chicago Has Put 50k High-Res Images ... by jmkd on Tuesday November 13, 2018 @06:34AM (#18440221)

Sorry, also no. Let me be clear, museum partners would not sign contracts - and thus the project would not exist - if these stipulations about preventing downloading were not met. It was a dealbreaker across the board, and Google's compromise was a good one. Without it there would not be this access to art and culture.

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Re:The Art Institute of Chicago Has Put 50k High-Res Images ... by veridies on Sunday November 11, 2018 @09:36PM (#18430210)

I've noticed a couple cases where Wikimedia contributors have done that legwork and extracted the original tiles; I don't know if there's any systematic effort to do so, though.

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Re:The Art Institute of Chicago Has Put 50k High-Res Images ... by dheral on Monday November 12, 2018 @12:29AM (#18430774)

(open culture)[http://www.openculture.com/] is maybe such an attempt.

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Re:The Art Institute of Chicago Has Put 50k High-Res Images ... by forapurpose on Sunday November 11, 2018 @06:21PM (#18429355)

http://www.artcyclopedia.com/

I don't know how up-to-date it is.

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Re:The Art Institute of Chicago Has Put 50k High-Res Images ... by thirdsun on Monday November 12, 2018 @02:08AM (#18431055)

WikiArt comes to mind: https://www.wikiart.org/

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