Show HN: Download Hi-Res Public Domain Art, Posters and Illustrations | Hacker News Reader

Show HN: Download Hi-Res Public Domain Art, Posters and Illustrations

artvee.com

550 pointstherecb51 comments

This is great and I'd be happy to add it to my list of High Quality Collections of Digitized Art and Archival Finds[1], where I catalog sites like these, but where are the images coming from? There seems to be no information.

For example for the American artist Charles Courtney Curran, Artvee has three: https://artvee.com/artist/charles-courtney-curran/

This is more than NY Public Library with only one: https://digitalcollections.nypl.org/search/index?utf8=%E2%9C...

And the Art institute of Chicago, with also only one: https://www.artic.edu/artists/5703/charles-courtney-curran

(note there are no duplicates among these galleries!)

And the National Gallery, with zero: https://www.nga.gov/collection-search-result.html?artist=Cha...

And the Smithsonian, which has none of the above but does have his photomechanical prints: https://www.si.edu/search?edan_q=charles%2Bcourtney%2Bcurran...

Wikipedia, by the way, has several not seen in any of the above. So I'd like to know where you are sourcing these.

[1] https://simonsarris.com/art-collections

I echo this call for source info.

Also, Simon, I didn't know that you maintained such a resource! Thank you, I will be using it.

Rawpixel also have an extensive collection of public domain art if you’ve not come across them before

https://www.rawpixel.com

Do you have any better way of looking for sources other than Google Image search? Mostly I found the Charles Courtney Curran images on Pinterest, eBay (!) and several Chinese "art reproduction" sites. No closer to working out where it was sourced from.

The images are sourced from museums and libraries with open access policies all over the world. We are currently working on adding sources, locations and other metadata to all the images as well as an API.

I love the fact that you aggregate only the art work from world museums. I was looking for a site that I could browse such work. I did book mark your site.

Some feedback if you'd like - the infinite scroll is a bad browsing experience when used for huge amount of work: - picture loading starts slowing down when scrolling too much. - when a reach a point I cannot save my browsing process. For example I browsed the Abstract category. There are so many works that I can't possibly see them all in one sitting. Next time when I sit to browse I can't continue from where I have reached.

My use case for your site would be to find good wallpapers for my PC. Apart for the browsing experience it would be nice to be able to filter images based on resolution or aspect ratio so that I can find wallpapers. You mentioned you are making an API so maybe that could solve that.

Art needs to be seen and the best place for me to see is on my desktop wallpaper :)

Really nice. Does anyone have a recommendation for a service which print such images as posters at a reasonable price?

I'm curious about this as well. If no service exists, does anyone happen know what types of printers work best for these? I'd be willing to try it myself if I knew where to start.

I sell prints of public domain art on Etsy.

Until the pandemic I produced the prints myself, but now I use print-on-demand companies like Printful or Gooten. There are similar companies out there, but these are a good balance of price and quality.

Please share the URL to your shop :)

Sure, it’s here: https://www.etsy.com/uk/shop/TheDoveAndTheSeagull

Very nice prints!

I have a store that sells vintage propaganda posters primarily, we have expanded into vintage travel and health over the last few years.

https://propagandaposterstore.com/

For prints Costco and Walmart have some crazy low prices and they often advertise them as archival quality as well.

FYI, you can get ICC profiles fo Costco printers and papers as well.

Here's listing for California Costcos: https://www.drycreekphoto.com/icc/Profiles/California_profil...

Instructions: https://www.drycreekphoto.com/icc/CostcoPosterPrinters.html

I’m related to a professor of design, and he recommends White House Custom Color (https://www.whcc.com/) for prints. I think you may need to upload a sample of your “work” to gain access, at least last time I made an account.

I actually have some of his prints from an exhibition hanging on my wall (via 3M adhesive strips), printed via this service. These are printed on a ~1/8” board and have a glossy protective finish. They’re super high quality.

As for whether the price is reasonable...I’ll leave that to you and your utility function.

(PS: OP’s site is awesome)

A little different from posters, but if you're looking for something a little more durable I've had success with CanvasChamp for canvas wraps: https://www.canvaschamp.com/

In comparison to other sites I've used their framing is much more sturdy. Never had any issues with flexing or anything. Good quality printing, and very

Some of my favorite posters are open source NASA posters.

Find them here: https://artvee.com/?s=nasa&post_type=product&product_cat=0

NASA's direct link to the entire collection: https://www.jpl.nasa.gov/visions-of-the-future/

Was just going to post this too. Also the SpaceX travel posters are online as well.

OH, thank you this, amazing art!

Do you have an API? (See Pexels and Unsplash if you need inspiration) Would be really useful for wallpaper changing scripts.

Though the content is free, having all public domain art amassed is a useful service and I too would like an API. I'd even pay for it!

Cool project and the site design is really nice. It seems a little slow for me though, it might just be getting hit by HN right now.

Wow, fantastic website! Would be perfect if the filenames of the pictures had the name of the picture + author in it.

If you want more art in your life in general, please see the Twitter bots from https://twitter.com/andreitr.

(I've tried to get him onto Mastodon/Fediverse as well, but he's looking for the right instance.)

https://botsin.space/about/more might be worth a look since it's primarily for Fediverse bots.

I've suggested that to him. I have a few bots there myself :-)

Amazing site, thanks for sharing.

Love the design and I really look forward to exploring once the HN hug of death has subsided.

As someone who’s spent a long and frustrating time exploring various open access art databases, I admire your persistence and patience in putting so much quality art together.

This is perhaps more reasonable for the community to troubleshoot, but do you know why there's no thumbnail showing up for tools like https://iframely.com/ ? Over on lemmy I'd like to post more of these but the preview isn't working. https://dev.lemmy.ml/c/artworks I rate about a 0.1/10 at front-end knowledge so I poked a bit but couldn't quite figure it out.

Very nice! Is there a way to provide feedback on a given item? For example, this[1] seems to have a typo in the title (and thus the URL).

I'm sure you've already thought of this, but it's pretty easy to see how to monetize this by affiliate-linking out to a print/frame provider.

[1]: https://artvee.com/dl/valles-mariners/

It is not "...Paintings, Drawings and Illustrations from some of the best artists the world has ever known", unless you believe this primarily applies to Euro/Western art.

E.g., Utagawa Hiroshige, the Japanese ukiyo-e artist who is "considered the last great master of that tradition" has just one entry.

You're welcome to vote me down for pointing out cultural bias, but I don't think you should deny it or gloss over it with your downvote. Especially at this time.

"some of the" usually indicates that the collection is not exhaustive.

I found a download link error at https://artvee.com/dl/ault-and-wiborg-ad-008/ The download links point to a very different image, couldn't figure out why.

By simply google a bit, found another website (not mine):

https://www.publicdomainpictures.net/en/hledej.php?hleda=art

No idea if there are other good sites like artvee, good job done!

Wonderful!

The Dietmar Winkler’s MIT Posters are a nice discovery -> https://artvee.com/collection/dietmar-winklers-mit-posters/

Wish I could search by artist's region. Eg. Canada, Japan, etc.

Nice!

You could order framed prints of these via YC company levelframes.com... they won’t do copyrighted stuff but since this is all public domain... perfect!

This is great, thanks.

Incidentally, for people who are looking for an image to illustrate your article, something beyond the usual suspects of guy at open office or girl w laptop and plant, I like embedded pins from Pinterest. Very easily discoverable and you can find plenty that's unique there.

But for a while at least, I may switch to using these images.

The art is beautiful and the site is nice. I love the size of the thumbnails!

Public domain media, is the best kind. Looks like a great art resource.

I love these arts. Though the site's page load is quite slow

royal collection trust, https://www.rct.uk/

wow, this is great! thanks for making this

The website itself is a work of art.

Something isn't right with the resolutions:

   Standard, 1164 x 2400px
   JPG, Size: 3.55 MB, 300dpi

   Max Size, 1940 x 4000px
   JPG, Size: 9.63 MB, 300dpi

They can't be both 300dpi (unless your dpi settings doesn't have anything to do with the physical size of the original artwork, in which case why bother with dpi settings at all?).

One possibility is that the level of compression is different in the two jpgs, that could account for a lot of filesize difference. But really dpi doesn't mean much when you know the pixel dimesnions[1].

1: http://www.pacenterforphotography.org/2018/08/dpi-ppi-are-me...

This is really, really nice but unfortunately the website is too slow to be usable right now.

"Discover Classical Art" it said.

I entered "porn" in the search box

I got nothing.

Puzzled...

Try "Zeus" or "Jupiter" for ancient furry. Also, rich renaissance italians didn't just invite dates upstairs to see their etchings, they had statuary.

A plausible theory explaining: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Suburban_Baths_(Pompeii)#Eroti... is that, just like modern parking garages are often colour coded, "you're unlikely to forget where you left your street clothes with those murals".

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