55 karma · joined May 21, 2016
I've always got several personal projects going.
I don't have them for download, but this is the script I used to download and resize them all. It took about 24 hours for me:
https://github.com/zensible/art_slideshow/blob/shared/lib/ta...
Just go through the install steps in the README and run the above. It may take a smidge of hacking to get it working, this hasn't been polished for public consumption.
They only made the public domain images downloadable + zoomable, about 204,000 (not sure where you got the 50k figure). Stuff from 1900+ is often still under copyright, so that's why most of them are low-res.
Of the 204k, I filtered out baseball cards and cigarette packages, leaving 193,525. Of these, 151,782 are what I considered high quality: 1800+ pixels width and/or height.
There are def tiny images in there like this...
http://images.metmuseum.org/CRDImages/ao/original/VS91_37_16...
...but really anything interesting to an art student has hella resolution.
All in all it's a pretty traditional, conservative collection -- Google's is great for newer and crazier stuff.
The cabinet was the only cost I just couldn't get down. I found broken down arcades on craigslist for less than $200 but I'd need to get them home and retrofit. Guess I should've kept an eye on ebay for longer.