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Comment by mikae1 | Hacker News Reader

> It's a shame that we don't already have this being done by public libraries.

What makes you say that? It's already done by so many institutions within the GLAM sector. They usually don't have the same marketing budget as Getty though. Here's[1] a glimpse into the digital heritage of the EU. That's a good starting point for some exploration.

[1] https://www.europeana.eu/en

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This is the first item I tried:

https://www.europeana.eu/en/item/08547/Museu_ProvidedCHO_Sta...

The image is only 600x768 pixels. Way too small to be useful. You can't even read the text in the image. The original work is 30x42 cm.

Ouch. And with a 300 pixel wide watermark at that...

A starting point for exploration, as I said… You usually have to follow links to the online collections of the originating institution to find high resolution files. Some have them, some do not.

It would be cool if it actually worked like that (as a low resolution preview of things you can get on the actual museum website) - in this case the one offered on the museum website appears to be identical. Same low resolution, same watermark. Perhaps they could save people time by tagging entries that they had already received in low or watermark damaged quality so they could be filtered out of the search.

As I wrote, "Some have them, some do not."

There are lots of possible obstacles to showing high resolution digitizations.

Yes. I'm just noting as currently implemented, it's not very usable. If they had filtering for the low quality trash, it'd be more useful.

The fact that they would deface the image with a watermark tells me a great deal about the values of the "museum".

> Unfortunately, the item media as provided to Europeana can not be displayed at the moment. Please try to download the media or view the item on the providing institution's website.

Download link is a dead dropbox account. And this is the first thing I tried.

Bad luck to get something like that in 50,000,000+ chances. Which item was it?

the number chances is not the problem, it's their outcome ;)

I tried 5 random things and every single one was a dead link. Taxpayer money well spent here

Spending 6 millions EUR per year to get an index of blurry pictures in ElasticSearch (that they just crawled from somewhere). Well, it's only here for 15 years... so make the calculation.

You are clearly misrepresentating the value here. They also put a watermark on each image. /s

In all fairness, they don't all have watermarks. I don't know why. Perhaps they collected images from a variety of sources before downscaling and those sources included watermarks. I kind of wish that sort of thing had been part of the QA process though. Decent resolution and clean images would make this so much more valuable.

Where and what exactly?

I entered "dog" as search term and each and every item I clicked on, that had a Download option, worked fantastically well: https://www.europeana.eu/en/search?page=1&view=grid&query=do...

Taxpayer money well spent indeed!

Still very low resolution though :/

Which one? I got a gigapixel image of a nice artwork as a TIFF with little effort.

The image in the parent we were commenting on, and many others I searched for as well. I couldn't find any interface for identifying which resources on the remote sites were of reasonably high resolution that would be useful, and which were not.

Also some 3D models: https://www.bavarikon.de/3dmodels?lang=en

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