Google expands art searches
Google has announced a major expansion of its Google Art Project. From now on, with a few simple clicks, art lovers from all over the world will be able to discover not only paintings, but also sculpture, street art and photographs from 151 museums in 40 countries.
Since Google introduced its art project last year, curators, artists, and viewers around the world have offered exciting ideas on how to enhance the experience of collecting, sharing and discovering art. Institutions from all over the world asked to join the project, urging the company to increase the diversity of the works on display.
The original project contained 17 museums from nine countries and 1,000 images, almost all paintings by Western masters. Today, the project includes more than 30,000 high-resolution artworks, with Street View images from 46 museums, and more are on the way.
The expanded Art Project encompasses institutions of all sizes, specializing in art or other types of culture.
Below are some of the new features that can be enjoyed with the project expansion:
- Using completely new tools, called Explore and Discover, you can search for artworks by period, artist or type of artwork, and view works from different museums around the world.
- Google+ and Places are also integrated into the site, allowing the user to create even more engaging personal galleries.
- Street View images are now displayed in higher quality. A specially designed Street View “cart” took 360-degree images of the interior of the selected galleries, which were then linked together, allowing seamless navigation through more than 385 rooms inside the museums. You can also explore the interior of the galleries directly from the Street View option of Google Maps.
- Thanks to Google's “gigapixel” photo capture technology, there are currently 46 works of art available, photographed with extraordinary detail and using a very high resolution so that the user can study the details of the brush strokes and patina. , something that would be impossible to see with the naked eye.
- An improved My Gallery tool allows the user to select any of the 30,000 works of art - along with their favorite details - to build their own personalized gallery. You can also add comments to each painting and share the entire collection with friends and family (an ideal tool for students).
The Art Project is part of Google's efforts to bring culture to the Internet and make it available to the widest possible audience. Source: Google
