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Comment by mcjiggerlog | Hacker News Reader

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.

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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.

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.

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...

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

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...

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