Image recognition app scans paintings to act like Shazam for art (2024)
Taking a souvenir home from an art gallery no longer has to mean a trip to the gift shop. A new app lets people scan a work of art with their smartphone camera to find out more about it and save a digital copy.
The app, called Smartify, uses image recognition to identify scanned artworks and provide people with additional information about them. Users can then add the works to their own digital collection. Smartify co-founder Thanos Kokkiniotis describes it as a combination of the music discovery service Spotify and music recognition app Shazam – but for visual works.
The app will launch in May for selected artworks at the Louvre in Paris, France, and the Metropolitan Museum of Art in New York, and all the artworks at the Rijksmuseum in Amsterdam and the Wallace Collection in London.
Many museums and galleries have apps to tell visitors more about their collections, but Smartify will work across institutions. You also won’t need to visit an original work to get the benefit: scan a postcard of Leonardo da Vinci’s Mona Lisa and the app will bring up information in the same way as if you were standing in front of it atthe Louvre.
Creating an app that can recognise individual paintings is relatively easy because most galleries already have digitised versions of their collections, says Kokkiniotis. The challenging part is convincing galleries to let the app access this information. Then it’s a matter of matching up what’s seen through the smartphone camera with the database of digitised artworks.
Digital complement
Other digital collections, such as Google’s Art Project, showcase digital versions of paintings and offer virtual tours around galleries, but Smartify is intended to complement real-world visits to galleries and not just act as an online image database.
Kokkiniotis hopes that more institutions and individual artists will make their works available as the app grows in popularity. Museums and galleries that sign up will also be able to access demographic information about people who use Smartify and the artworks they interact with, which they could use to inform their marketing and advertising. People logging into the app will have their data anonymised, says co-founder Anna Lowe. If they don’t want to share their data, they can use the app without logging in.
But not everyone is so enthusiastic about people using smartphones in galleries. “Many visitors go to museums to have an unplugged experience,” says Kevin Walker at the Royal College of Art in London.
He thinks visitors should look up from their phones and put their trust in gallery curators when it comes to viewing works of art. “They’re the experts in experience,” he says.
Article amended on 3 March 2017
We have corrected the location of Leonardo da Vinci’s Mona Lisa
The app, called Smartify, uses image recognition to identify scanned artworks and provide people with additional information about them. Users can then add the works to their own digital collection.
store to download SMARTIFY. Open the app. and hold your phone's camera up to a portrait to “scan” the work of art. Learn about your favorite portraits now or save information and images for later.
An app has launched that allows users to instantly identify artworks and access information about them, by simply scanning them with a smartphone. Smartify launched at the Royal Academy of Arts in London last week.
Smartify, which has been dubbed Shazam for the art world, allows you to instantly identify artworks and access detailed information about thousands of works by scanning them with a smartphone.
Use an image recognition app or run a reverse image search. You can also use the signature on an image to find it online. Ask an expert to identify the painting for you, or do it yourself using clues to narrow down the date and the artistic movement the painting belongs to.
With Google Lens you can identify artworks using your camera, which is great if you're out and about, but you can also choose a screenshot which is what we are doing here. Select the screenshot and search using the image.
Go to the Apple App Store or Android Google Play store.Download the app.Open the app and hold your phone camera up to your chosen artwork. This 'scans' the work and provides extra information as well as background on the artist.
What visual Shazam now offers is the ability to scan specially tagged images like posters that have been watermarked to take viewers to a specific mini-site or content experience, or to scan a product QR code and follow it to a similar destination.
Can I use these Shazam alternatives on both Android and iOS devices? Most of the apps listed, such as SoundHound, Musixmatch, and TuneIn, are available for both Android and iOS devices.
The app, called Smartify, uses image recognition to identify scanned artworks and provide people with additional information about them. Users can then add the works to their own digital collection.
Scanning your artwork means converting your art into digital images. Scanning is an alternative to photographing artwork and gives you truer-to-life results. When using a professional-caliber printer, scanning will create high-resolution art prints that will last without fading and can be sold.
Remember Art Selfie? This Google Arts & Culture feature, launched in 2018, helped the world find their doppelgangers across art history. Now, using the power of generative AI, Art Selfie 2 brings you face to face with culture again, revisiting the world's art, history and culture with you at the center.
You can use Google Lens to identify images on your camera and gain more information about landmarks, plants, animals, products, and other objects. It can also be used to scan and auto-translate text.
Introduction: My name is Wyatt Volkman LLD, I am a handsome, rich, comfortable, lively, zealous, graceful, gifted person who loves writing and wants to share my knowledge and understanding with you.
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