Hacker News Board Hacker News, browsed like a classic message board
Live data from Hacker News

The Met Makes 375k Images Available for Free

nytimes.com

Post reply on HN
Print view View original

81–90 of 104 posts

Re: The Met Makes 375k Images Available for Free

#81

Post by mwexler »

elorant wrote: post #24
pcurve wrote: post #20

This is a real treat... I can see Van Gogh like this one http://images.metmuseum.org/CRDImages/ep/original/DT1567.jpg in such detail, without having to go to the museum. With my degrading eye sights, this might even be better than going to museum.

Unless you have a really big monitor, like 40" or so, nothing compares to the real thing. I once saw a Rothko and my jaw dropped to the floor. The thing was so imposing, not only the theme was captivating but the sheer size of the picture made it look grandiose in every sense. The same goes for Pollock's artworks, some Picassos and so on.

Finally, a reason to buy an MS Surface Hub (https://www.microsoft.com/microsoft-surface-hub/en-us). Or at least a Surface Studio (https://www.microsoft.com/en-us/surface/devices/surface-stud...).

Re: The Met Makes 375k Images Available for Free

#82

Post by garethsprice »

xherberta wrote: post #80
austinjp wrote: post #67

Earlier quoted context omitted.

A simple starting point for contemplating any art is to ask yourself the questions: What is the artist trying to say? Have they said it well? Was it worth saying? These are of course highly subjective. Your answers may be very different from those of others and even from the artist themselves. And that's fine. These questions can also springboard your curiosity if you allow it. What was the artist trying to say? How…

Well said! An economist once argued that it would be worthwhile for museums to sell the bottom 1% of their collections (stuff that's destined to moulder in the archives and would never be displayed anyway) and set up trusts that would fund free admission. Then, people would feel freer to visit for just an hour and enjoy small tastes of art more frequently. (Unfortunately, selling anything is taboo in the world of art…

Most museums offer annual memberships that are only 2-3x the cost of a single day ticket. I used to live within walking distance of MoMA and it changed my experience of art to be able to wander up and linger on a single piece or exhibit for long periods without worrying about "doing it all" in one day.

Strongly recommend getting memberships to your local museums!

Re: The Met Makes 375k Images Available for Free

#83

Post by coldpie »

ilyagr wrote: post #45
ilyagr wrote: post #43

See also Google art project, with tons of pictures from many museums in insanely high resolution: https://www.google.com/culturalinstitute/beta/category/artis... I find it awesome.

The downside of Google art project is that you aren't supposed to download the images.

Oh? A lot of them are on Wikipedia. Is there some special arrangement for a subset of the images?

Re: The Met Makes 375k Images Available for Free

#84

Post by nsimoneaux »

djsumdog wrote: post #34

I've been looking for more CC0 resources as I've started doing more video editing. This is pretty awesome. Some other CC0 art/photo websites I've used a lot lately: https://pixabay.com/ https://unsplash.com/

I am a musician, and these may be of service as well:

https://archive.org/details/Actually

https://archive.org/details/myfreedownloads.info

Thanks in advance for listening!

Re: The Met Makes 375k Images Available for Free

#85

Post by vanderZwan »

dx034 wrote: post #57
zump wrote: post #5

Nice, maybe our deep nets can finally make real art after being trained on by the masters.

Even many people wouldn't be able to create real art by looking at all those pictures. Probably not even when trained by one of the painters.

Have you seen Mario Klingemann's recent experiments?

https://twitter.com/quasimondo/status/825821993501069317

Re: The Met Makes 375k Images Available for Free

#86

Post by asleepawake »

asleepawake wrote: post #73
semi-extrinsic wrote: post #60

Earlier quoted context omitted.

There's many ways to skin that cat - assuming Unix, immediate options include: the images are stored locally, you have some mapping from filename to title, and you create new images with watermarks using ImageMagick in a bash script or the images are hosted online, and you write a small C/Python/whatever code that gets the URLs and associated titles from the host, and then uses Imlib2 (maybe with some wrapper) to dis…

Yea I was trying to find a way to do it with code that's by default shipped on the mac. Unfortunately imagemagick is not. And the php functions to actually add text to an image are not loaded by default. Maybe I can do something by converting the images to pdfs. The speed of the program isn't an issue it just has to be completely automated.

finally found a way to do it with applescript objective c :)

Re: The Met Makes 375k Images Available for Free

#87

Post by kjell »

gregsadetsky wrote: post #23
scosman wrote: post #22

Earlier quoted context omitted.

They published an index on Github. It would likely be a more responsible way to access this versus hammering their API. https://github.com/metmuseum/openaccess

Unfortunately, as stated in that repo's readme: `Images are not included and are not part of the dataset.` The repo doesn't include the images, which is understandable; however, the CSV file doesn't even include links to the images.

Excluding the images themselves from the dataset is one thing, but there's an open issue to include a link to the images: https://github.com/metmuseum/openaccess/issues/2

Re: The Met Makes 375k Images Available for Free

#88

Post by kjell »

urda wrote: post #17

Is there a torrent or dump of all the images? I wouldn't mind seeding / helping to keep an archive of all this. This is pretty great!

Here's an example torrent of metadata and images from the Rijksmuseum put together by an art history researcher: http://matthewlincoln.net/2015/10/19/the-rijksmuseum-as-bitt...

Re: The Met Makes 375k Images Available for Free

#90

Post by pjlegato »

matt_morgan wrote: post #44
pjlegato wrote: post #33

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Yes, these images were already in the public domain. It was, however, not easy to find high resolution digital images of them online. This move is about making those images easily available on their website.

They were also already available on the website in high resolution, many of them since 2011. The difference this time is the CC0 licensing, I'm pretty sure. A lot of people are confused about the licensing of museum images and why it's news that a major museum is releasing them CC0 when they're already public domain. I see some good thoughts here--e.g., absolutely there is a difference between 2D and 3D images (an im…

The CC0 licensing assertion is simple ass-covering by the museum's lawyers. Images that are exact replicas of works of artists who have been dead for 70 years or more are in fact public domain under US copyright law no matter what license they assert, per Bridgeman.

Originality is a critical element of being able to assert copyright in a derivative work. To the extent that these are exact reproductions, they have no element of originality and the museum's assertions of license are invalid.

The story here is that you get an "official" public domain image from the museum itself, which will presumably be of technically high quality - appropriate lighting, correct focus, high res, camera plane exactly parallel to the work, camera on a tripod, etc. as opposed to the widely varying quality of the images you find on the web now - while some are technically fine, others are shot by a museum visitor with shaky hands, scanned from a photo book, etc.

You can now also find these images from a reputable, central source rather than scattered across a slew of ad farms.

Post reply on HN