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Show HN: Artpip – 4k fine art for your desktop

artpip.com

142 pointsmcjiggerlog76 comments

Artpip is great, use it for months now, really love it!

There is one thing though: I also have LittleSnitch installed and it shows that Artpip often tries to connect to direct IPs.

Personally, I don't like giving apps permissions to connect to some random IPs.

Would be nice if it used something more meaningful, like images.artpip.com.

Images should be behind images.artpip.com, e.g. https://images.artpip.com/artist-images/s0/Y6/jG-small.jpg

I'll take a look into what's causing that.

All the IPs that images.artpip.com resolves to are missing reverse (PTR) records.

Creator here!

Artpip started off as a side project to help me learn a bit more about art in general and has grown from there. It's been great fun making it and I have learnt A LOT about art history in the process. I can now recognise a lot of painters and have got pretty good at dating/categorising paintings (compared to before, at least!).

Happy to answer any questions.

Could it update the lock screen picture as well? I find that a lot more interesting than the desktop which I barely ever see.

I presume you mean on Windows. Unfortunately this is pretty difficult. I'd like to make it happen so I'll look into it again at some point.

from what I recall you are able to set it from the registry.

create this key with a string value called 'LockScreenImage', this string should point directly to an image, i.e: C:\.... HKEY_LOCAL_MACHINE\SOFTWARE\Policies\Microsoft\Windows\Personalization

throwaway because of not wanting to get arrested for hacking the registry

???

http://www.kunal-chowdhury.com/2015/11/uwp-lock-screen.html

But it's not an UWP.

Yep. You can now call these APIs from the desktop, AFAIK.

There may be a little more to it, but sadly after setting it up for a couple hours, it seems the TrySetLockScreenImageAsync method always returns failure from a non-UWP app :(

If anyone else wants to tinker with it https://gist.github.com/Connicpu/8b092b2c0ad539573b893dbca54...

Sorry. Seems it's limited in what paths pictures can be loaded from. Bloody Microsoft.

I use a screensaver on my Mac, and it seems like it refuses to recognise the image in ~/Library/Application Support/Artpip/images as an inmate without the .jpg extension. Is there any chance of you changing the images to use a .jpg extension, so I can set my screensaver to use your folder automatically.

Interesting. Yeah, I can do that.

There's another project that does exactly that, City Art Search: https://www.microsoft.com/en-us/store/p/city-art-search/9wzd...

Wow that's the first app from the Windows store that I actually wanted to install.

It's very nice on Windows tablets and phones (a vanishing species, unfortunately).

The author has posted about it on Reddit: https://www.reddit.com/r/windowsphone/comments/5yjdpp/city_a...

Please also note that you might be better served by a new "Preview" version here: https://www.microsoft.com/en-us/store/p/cas-preview/9nblggh4...

Don't know why they still keep it in preview.

Any resources you can suggest to learn more about art history? Preferably some books as well.

I like the idea, though. I don't really look at my desktop very often, but this might give me that push.

Question on the project, though. Whenever I step away from my laptop for a minute, I have a hot corner to display a screen saver. Any way of using this as a substitute for the screen savers, so it'll just cycle art?

I recommend reading "The Story of Art" by Gombrich. It is very well written, although perhaps it should have been called "The Story of Western Art".

I was going to recommend the same book. It's a pretty good starting place.

I've also enjoyed Theories of Modern Art by Chipp [1]. Gives a great insight into the mind of the artist.

[1] http://www.goodreads.com/book/show/93073.Theories_of_Modern_...

> I don't really look at my desktop very often

Use an older second monitor that you have laying around. Its proximity to the main monitor will place the paintings right in your viewfield, but your work on the main monitor will be unaffected. When you take a breather you can enjoy art.

Don't take this as an officially supported feature, but http://artpip.com/live exists if you want to simply display the featured artwork on a second monitor in a fullscreen browser. It should refresh and stay up to date.

I'm using it to power my ghetto live painting - http://i.imgur.com/bNDEZTu.jpg

L’Histoire de l’art (History of art) lectures by Élie Faure

The Amsterdam Rijksmuseum has a large collection of high resolution pictures available for download https://www.rijksmuseum.nl/en/rijksstudio without cost.

If you make a collection that fit a screen or with proper cropping and have each individual user create it's own account it would save you the bandwidth :-)

I've been burned too many times by hotlinking to third parties and then having the source disappear on me.

Thanks for the link though, I'll look into including some of the imagery.

If you don't mind my asking, are you making money from this? Maybe you could do an interview over at indiehackers.com!

I was trying to support it through the print sales at first and that was nowhere near covering costs as there wasn't much interest to be honest.

The Pro version was only launched last week, so still early days!

Could we have discovery mode for unknown/new artists' work?

I'd definitely like to support current artists at some point. I wasn't sure what the best way to build up a library would be, though. I guess just manually contacting artists.

althought the content is more concept art instead of fine art, you might like the Artstation Chrome extension, it's a great way to discover new artist:

https://chrome.google.com/webstore/detail/artstation-discove...

Love the app! Just bought a license :)

Re: Art history - It would be great to see a blurb about the artwork in the app to put some context to the work. eg: https://www.google.com/culturalinstitute/beta/asset/fanatics...

I made a similar project for myself. Downloaded a bunch of painting torrents and set them as auto-changing backgrounds at interval of 5 minutes. For about 2 years I set a second monitor to work as a museum tour - to walk me through art. I watched Hermitage, Sotheby's and another one with 50K paintings on random mode.

An important feature was that I engraved the name of the author and painting on the images themselves in order to remember what I like most (hint: Hermitage is full of excellent portraits of russian aristocracy). After some time, visual detail begins to open up and art appreciation increases. We just need exposure.

I had a lot of hope I could install it with pip ... and then found it was only for Windows and Mac -__-

It would be really awesome if it worked like this:

    sudo pip install artpip
    artpip install starry-night

Linux version is top of the feature list!

Your command line app is actually a pretty cool idea, too.

Well, you can run something like

    curl http://artpip.com/api/featured |
    jq ".artworks[0].url" |
    xargs -n1 curl > /tmp/wall.jpg &&
    feh --bg-fill /tmp/wall.jpg

via crontab every morning or so. But the dev(s) might not be happy about it (although the image itself is downloaded from Wikimedia, not artpip.com).

Fine by me. I think I've been convinced to make a lightweight command line version of the app anyway, so in the future there should be a prepackaged way of doing the above.

Improved it a little bit. Selects a random image from the feature list.

  #!/bin/bash
  curl -s http://artpip.com/api/featured |
  jq -r '.artworks | map(.url) | join("\n")' |
  shuf -n 1 |
  xargs curl -s > /tmp/wall.jpg &&
  feh --bg-fill /tmp/wall.jpg

Heh, i ended up doing that, too. It's possible to just replace

    jq ".artworks[0].url"

with

    jq ".artworks[$((RANDOM % 5))].url"

…at least in bash and zsh. But your version will work better if there ever are more (or less) than 5 featured items.

Nice! Similar to a side project of mine that I have sadly had little time to improve: http://artfulmac.com

The bandwidth costs have become noticeable for me, so that's something to watch out for.

I hope you can keep it going! I've been an Artful user for quite awhile and really appreciate it.

I really like Artful and am willing to support it so it's viable for you to continue

I was really excited for this, but it is just a wrapper for the Google Art project. I am not really sure how you got the rights to be able to sell prints of these, or why you want to charge $9.99 a month for a pro version, but good luck!

Ah, okay you are able to print them because some are public domain. But it doesn't look like all of them are? Looking at the category that I am guessing you pulled these from (https://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/Category:Google_Art_Proje...), some have pretty restrictive rights.

One of your recently featured artworks (https://www.artpip.com/artwork/57a4cf0970f12152abacdf78) seems to be owned by the Van Gogh Museum and needs a license to be printed. If I wanted to order a print of that, do you have the correct license?

Most of the images have been sourced from wikimedia and are all considered in the public domain.

See [1] for an example of wikimedia's position on licencing:

'The official position taken by the Wikimedia Foundation is that "faithful reproductions of two-dimensional public domain works of art are public domain".'

Also, it's a $9.99 one-off payment, not monthly. Serving tens of thousands of high-res images a day adds up, so there's some extra paid features there for those that particularly enjoy the app and feel like supporting the project.

[1] https://commons.m.wikimedia.org/wiki/File:Van_Gogh_-_Starry_...

So that means "if the artwork is public domain, a faithful reproduction/photo of it is also public domain". But if the original artwork is not PD it's not covered by that statement.

I can imagine a situation where an artwork is copyrighted but someone takes a photo of it and uploads it to Wikimedia saying 'here, use my photo'.. but they don't have rights over the original. Which would be like camming a film in the cinema and saying 'the original is copyrighted but my reproduction is PD'.

Not trying to knock the idea - I'm an artist myself and think anything that helps spread and communicate art is great - good on you. Just something to keep an eye on.

The painting in grandparent's comment is from 1868, I don't think anyone can meaningfully claim the copyright to that, no matter how good of a picture they took.

A tangential thought while we're on the subject: NASA imagery can actually be used commercially and even sold for profit. The only caveats are that you can't use the likeness of any employee (e.g. astronauts) without their permission, you can't use anything with current employees in it, and the usage cannot implicitly or explicitly convey endorsement by NASA.[0]

I've seen countless scummy stock photo sites selling NASA imagery for ridiculous prices (think $200 per image) when it's all completely free in the first place.

[0] https://www.nasa.gov/multimedia/guidelines/index.html

Does anyone know of a similar app for NASA imagery? That'd be awesome.

There's dozens of apps that will set your wallpaper to one of NASA's images of the day. Google will help you out.

I have just installed it and I really love it! I think it's the first app that convinced me in less than 5 minutes to pay for the premium package. Keep up the good work.

I've been using Muzei on Android for years. A pleasant surprise every single day.

I did a similar side project for the Chrome new tab page once. It uses Wikiart as a source. https://chrome.google.com/webstore/detail/picasso-new-tab-pa...

Love it! Great idea having the different periods available, it'll help for recognition next time I'm in a museum :)

By the way, the "add to favs" button should also be located directly into the menu bar dropdown. Right now if I want to mark a wallpaper as a favourite, I have to:

1. Click on the menu bar icon 2. Click on the "Show artpip" 3. Wait for the app to load 4. Click on the fav button.

Too many steps...

It should be in the menu - 3rd from top "Favourite Artwork".

My bad, I thought that it means to display my favourite artwork.

Another source of good images for this program is the Met http://www.metmuseum.org/press/news/2017/open-access

I love it! Could you add "og:type" to your pages? This way my art bookmarks will appear in the visual section in Kozmos (https://getkozmos.com)

Done!

Funny to see uruguayan Pedro Figari, of all people, featured today!

I whished there was something like this with a modern curation. I'd probably hate even more pieces, but also have a higher chance to see something interesting.

You had me at 4k, just signed up for pro :) It's hard to find good 4k desktop images, and the curated art is quite novel. Awesome!

Cool work but it seems to break my multiple desktop system... is this currently compatible with multiple desktops?

Do you mean multi-monitor or multi-workspace? I use it myself on a multi-monitor multi-workspace setup, so it sounds like a bug. Bug reports very welcome at support@artpip.com

Cool! Clearly it is inspired by Muzei for Android—you should at least give a shout out to them on your homepage.

The Windows version doesn't set a setup GIF, so it gets a default GIF. You should make a nice one :)

Is this artwork only available at a maximum resolution of 4k, or is that a guaranteed minimum?

4k is the maximum size available. If you have a screen with sufficient resolution, the app will use a 4k image. If you have a smaller screen it will use a smaller image.

This is really great. Would love to see a version available for Smart TVs.

Art software startups are a tough proposition. Google invests heavily in art and offers it on Chromecast as a screensaver. Amazon does the same on Fire Stick. Neither is customizable nor allows any interaction and discovery, but it's just good enough as free to make it tough to do anything unique at the consumer end. Art is low on the list of things most people want to access regularly, let alone pay for.

I had a startup that was working on easy art access. Essentially A Spotify for Art with both public domain and contemporary art. Decided the market just isn't there. But may do a Kickstarter of the device or run a simplified version of the software people could access for free or very cheap and see if any interest develops.

To elaborate on a tough situation, Google does show some contemporary art in its Chromecast rotations but the artist is not reimbursed for it. It's all done in name of publicity. Companies working in this area have a market on one side of artists who have little money, so you are a cost to them even to digitize their works. And on payer side you have numerous free art resources from museums. And Google who uses it as a culture talking point and just-good-enough feature in their products.

I think there are several markets in art delivery but it will take connections, money, and luck to prise it open.

> I think there are several markets in art delivery but it will take connections, money, and luck to prise it open.

Curious about this. I love art and visit musuems regularly.

The first time I saw a van Gogh at d'Orsay I got goose pimples. A flat 2D image on my laptop or a TV does not come anywhere close to the experience of seeing the painting itself.

Aren't musuems the best 'art delivery' mechanism there is?

It's true, TVs don't have the same experience the painting. However, they enable a lot of other abilities that let you experience art in a very different way.

With a 4K screen (even the super-cheap one I bought 3 years ago) and sufficient scanning resolution you can zoom in and see the paint clinging to individual fibers of canvas. You can achieve closeness and magnification far beyond what you can at an art museum. You'll never get that close to a real van Gogh, breathing on it and with a magnifying glass!

My thinking is education and exploration. There's a to be said for volume in art viewing too. With the TV+software experience, you can construct progressions of an artist's work, quickly build visual trees showing change and relationship of art genres. You can visualize the _genre_ and _time_ in a way few can at an art museum.

Also think about AR and VR experiences. In the light form, imagine watching curator talks when they can serve up high-resolution images and zoom in to specific features, or highlight and "pull out" sections side by side. Or superimpose their hands to visually guide your eye as it's discussed.

That's where I see the future of art in digital form: bringing it into the home and school, and augmenting the experience within the museum. TV brings vast scale and new presentation abilities, which I think will complement the power and complexity of individual static works.

Then, there is also the ability to deliver art that is not static, which I think will develop soon. Where the image itself slowly changes either by artistic effort (strictly dictated change) and algorithmic. I imagine a Kandinsky-like work that changes subtly over minutes, hours, or weeks.

I'm actually not a big art enthusiast myself. But it turns out I'm extremely passionate about art presentation and how access and exploration can be magnified.

Dang, now I want to pick this up again. I'd be interested in talking more, if you are. I love the subject.

What I'd like to see is 4K images from my favourite photographers on Instagram, displayed from a small device that I can plug into a spare port on a TV (or a smart TV app, I suppose). I'd pay a subscription for that (of course, I might be the only one :))

That's essentially the idea of what we were building. Ran out of time due to moving and job change, but I had that working great on Chromecast. Chromecast at least then was awfully clunky though.

For some demos I used cheap Android-powered dongles (like the Amazon Fire Stick, but wide-open rootable Android) to make a plug-and-play display device. With some small work it would be a fun Kickstarter.

As a McMansion Hell fan, I can only say:

An 'an art' app! :)

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