The Met Makes 375k Images Available for Free • Hacker News Board

Re: The Met Makes 375k Images Available for Free

#91

Post by sogen » Wed, Feb 08, 2017, 7:00 PM UTC

hackuser wrote: post #48

elorant wrote: post #24

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

> Unless you have a really big monitor, like 40" or so, nothing compares to the real thing I disagree; simply, "nothing compares to the real thing". But I can't have the real thing right here, so a large hi-def monitor is better than nothing. EDIT: If I sell a 40" monitor displaying a high-res Van Gogh - will the price compare to the real thing? (Sorry, couldn't resist.)

Well, there was a guy selling other people's Instagram pictures at $15k a pop...

Re: The Met Makes 375k Images Available for Free

#92

Post by sogen » Wed, Feb 08, 2017, 7:01 PM UTC

douche wrote: post #66

elorant wrote: post #24

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

What is it about Rothkos that are so impressive? Its's big bars of solid color painted on the wall. I just don't get it...

I think his talent was he was great at selling

Re: The Met Makes 375k Images Available for Free

#93

Post by extra88 » Wed, Feb 08, 2017, 7:35 PM UTC

micrio wrote: post #79

j_r_f wrote: post #77

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Yes truly a shame that they gave us a ton of files for free use but they aren't as ULTRA HD as you would like..

Ofcourse the huge volume is great, it's awesome! But by only offering single high-res .jpg files instead of image tilesets just makes the viewing experience less than pleasant.. Downloads are slow, the pages are unresponsive, and I can imagine it's going to cost them tons of unneeded bandwidth.

I agree that "deep zooming" is desirable. Looks like Micrio doesn't support the International Image Interoperability Framework [0], something I think a museum would be interested in. Oh, and I hate that http://micr.io uses a fullscreen background image that highjacks the scroll wheel.

[0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/International_Image_Interopera...

Re: The Met Makes 375k Images Available for Free

#94

Post by micrio » Wed, Feb 08, 2017, 8:00 PM UTC

extra88 wrote: post #93

micrio wrote: post #79

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Ofcourse the huge volume is great, it's awesome! But by only offering single high-res .jpg files instead of image tilesets just makes the viewing experience less than pleasant.. Downloads are slow, the pages are unresponsive, and I can imagine it's going to cost them tons of unneeded bandwidth.

I agree that "deep zooming" is desirable. Looks like Micrio doesn't support the International Image Interoperability Framework [0], something I think a museum would be interested in. Oh, and I hate that http://micr.io uses a fullscreen background image that highjacks the scroll wheel. [0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/International_Image_Interopera...

Thanks for your reply, you're right about that. Currently we've only been developing micr.io based on wishes we received, that includes features such as hotspots, tours, etc. See https://tuinderlusten-jheronimusbosch.ntr.nl/en for its first release. We simply haven't had the time yet!

Re: The Met Makes 375k Images Available for Free

#95

Post by awqrre » Thu, Feb 09, 2017, 2:44 AM UTC

gregsadetsky wrote: post #19

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!

To scrape, start here http://metmuseum.org/api/collection/collectionlisting?offset... and increase 'offset' by 100. The JSON output contains image URLs. The total number of results is 441048, so finding another endpoint that doesn't enforce a limit of 100 on the 'perPage' argument would be great. --- EDIT: thanks to spitfare, I updated the perPage argument to 100. The site doesn't allow larger values, but that's defi…

edit: it doesn't download the highest available resolution...

This Perl script should get most of the images (but it would probably be better to save them in the original sub-directories):

    use strict;
    use warnings;
    use LWP::Simple;
    use JSON qw(from_json);
    
    my $url    = "http://metmuseum.org/api/collection/collectionlisting?offset=";
    my $args   = "&pageSize=0&perPage=100&sortBy=Relevance&sortOrder=asc";
    my $offset = 0;
    
    while ($offset {'results'} };
      foreach my $i ( @results ) {
        my $filename = $i->{"largeImage"};
        my $title = $i->{"title"};
        print "Status: ".getstore("http://images.metmuseum.org/CRDImages/".$filename,$title.".jpg")." ".$filename. "\n";
      }
    }

Re: The Met Makes 375k Images Available for Free

#96

Post by beautifulfreak » Thu, Feb 09, 2017, 4:55 AM UTC

sogen wrote: post #91

hackuser wrote: post #48

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> Unless you have a really big monitor, like 40" or so, nothing compares to the real thing I disagree; simply, "nothing compares to the real thing". But I can't have the real thing right here, so a large hi-def monitor is better than nothing. EDIT: If I sell a 40" monitor displaying a high-res Van Gogh - will the price compare to the real thing? (Sorry, couldn't resist.)

Well, there was a guy selling other people's Instagram pictures at $15k a pop...

That would be Richard Prince. But he made $90k a pop. http://www.cnn.com/2015/05/27/living/richard-prince-instagra...

Re: The Met Makes 375k Images Available for Free

#97

Post by visarga » Thu, Feb 09, 2017, 5:33 AM UTC

asleepawake wrote: post #53

visarga wrote: post #52

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I displayed the Hermitage painting collection on a secondary 30'' monitor, set to rotate at 5 minutes. A key factor was that I had the titles watermarked on the images otherwise I would have been frustrated to see something beautiful that I don't know the name of. Had this setup for a couple of years, and watched lots of beautiful paintings. My purpose was to submerge my visual perception into art for a long time and…

How did you get the watermarks. Programmatically and if so how. Or did they come that way

I used a script that relied on Imagemagick.

Re: The Met Makes 375k Images Available for Free

#98

Post by techer » Thu, Feb 09, 2017, 11:38 AM UTC

awqrre wrote: post #95

gregsadetsky wrote: post #19

Earlier quoted context omitted.

To scrape, start here http://metmuseum.org/api/collection/collectionlisting?offset... and increase 'offset' by 100. The JSON output contains image URLs. The total number of results is 441048, so finding another endpoint that doesn't enforce a limit of 100 on the 'perPage' argument would be great. --- EDIT: thanks to spitfare, I updated the perPage argument to 100. The site doesn't allow larger values, but that's defi…

edit: it doesn't download the highest available resolution... This Perl script should get most of the images (but it would probably be better to save them in the original sub-directories): use strict; use warnings; use LWP::Simple; use JSON qw(from_json); my $url = "http://metmuseum.org/api/collection/collectionlisting?offset="; my $args = "&pageSize=0&perPage=100&sortBy=Relevance&sortOrder=asc"; my $offset = 0; whil…

Why doesn't it download the highest resolution out of interest? Thanks for the script...

Re: The Met Makes 375k Images Available for Free

#99

Post by awqrre » Thu, Feb 09, 2017, 2:53 PM UTC

techer wrote: post #98

awqrre wrote: post #95

Earlier quoted context omitted.

edit: it doesn't download the highest available resolution... This Perl script should get most of the images (but it would probably be better to save them in the original sub-directories): use strict; use warnings; use LWP::Simple; use JSON qw(from_json); my $url = "http://metmuseum.org/api/collection/collectionlisting?offset="; my $args = "&pageSize=0&perPage=100&sortBy=Relevance&sortOrder=asc"; my $offset = 0; whil…

Why doesn't it download the highest resolution out of interest? Thanks for the script...

not sure why, I haven't looked into yet... probably the url needs to be fixed

Re: The Met Makes 375k Images Available for Free

#100

Post by matt_morgan » Thu, Feb 09, 2017, 4:46 PM UTC

pjlegato wrote: post #90

matt_morgan wrote: post #44

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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…

Paul, you're actually going a little too far. No court case has ever shown that a "museum's assertions of license are invalid," and these are case-by-case issues. So Bridgeman may or may not apply in any given case. It could be cited as precedent for sure. But e.g. I'm pretty sure it specifically limited itself to 2D representations of 2D works.

When, in the past, good-hearted souls have scraped museum websites to construct larger images (e.g., from the old-fashioned zooming tools that only showed part of the image at a time), the museums in question stopped short of pursuing it in court for fear of just what you say. So it has not been tested (even though most thoughtful people agree with you about what would likely happen).

The Met has had (most of; maybe almost all) these images online since 2011. The licensing was unclear then--there was a hard to read, existing T&C that was more or less NC-BY-SA. Or maybe it was "no derivatives," I'm not sure. But getting the images out (hard but straightforward) without dealing with changing the license (hard and complicated) served basically 100% of the people without putting the Met at any risk.

This is now the third time in six years the Met has gotten a lot of news out of the "release" of these images. One could argue that this is not a big step, but if, in going CC0 it means they can release more images, that's a good thing. I haven't seen any report that the number of images has changed, actually. However, it does sound like they're not claiming copyright on 2D representations of 3D works in the public domain, which they certainly could do.