
50 Years of Art Books from the Met, for Free Download - brudgers
https://www.metmuseum.org/art/metpublications/titles-with-full-text-online?searchtype=F
======
mdlincoln
Several hundred publications from the Getty Museum (and the other research
arms of the Getty) are available for free download as well:
[https://www.getty.edu/publications/virtuallibrary/](https://www.getty.edu/publications/virtuallibrary/)

(I work at the Getty Research Institute)

~~~
BrentOzar
Just since I've got your eye, and you'll get a chuckle out of the bug - it
appears that the title listing pages don't handle unicode correctly:

"Fernand Khnopff: Portrait of Jeanne K\xE9fer"

[http://www.getty.edu/Search/VirtualLibrary?title=&author=Mic...](http://www.getty.edu/Search/VirtualLibrary?title=&author=Michel+Draguet&qt=&imprint=jpgt&type=&subject=&series=)

Click on the title, and the book details page renders correctly.

------
dataslap
Please use responsibly. Recommended to delay by a few days - it seems like
there is an initial surge going on right now. Increase download delay to 20
sec - 1 minute. Be respectful.

[https://github.com/ilyaperepelitsa/met_book_downloader](https://github.com/ilyaperepelitsa/met_book_downloader)

~~~
dataslap
P.S. it will take hours or days =))) <3 <3 <3

~~~
nimbyest
Has anyone downloaded all the books? How much data is it combined?

~~~
dataslap
21 Gigs in total for everything, ignoring errors (files too big / broken
links)

~~~
nimbyest
Not that bad, I was expecting much bigger files.

------
sotojuan
This is probably one of the best things I've seen posted in HN. Art books,
aside from the actual art, contain essays written by academics or experts not
found in Wikipedia or similar. They're also printed in small amounts and
fairly expensive (e.g. books on exhibitions are $50-70).

This kind of project opens up a lot of knowledge to the general public.

Now if we could get more Kenneth Clark books reprinted...

~~~
arittr
Totally agree - the essays/papers/artist ephemera in most of these books are
impossible to find and rarely reprinted. I've always found it strange that
looking at art is pretty common but reading/talking about art in a critical
way is seen as too academic/inaccessible for most people. I hope that by
putting this stuff into the public domain more people get excited about Art
History - it's a super interesting field that has a lot to offer and learning
how to do visual analysis is pretty useful in a ton of different fields.

~~~
komali2
For me, when I walk through an art museum, my favorite "description" tags are
one that are objective - "here's what this art is depicting (if it's not
clear), here's some neat historical context, maybe here's a little bit of what
the artist said about the work or how it was received."

But then there's tags (at least in MFAH) that were obviously written by
someone else and are completely subjective. My favorite one to lambast is just
a painting of a black square on a white background, and the description is a
400 word essay about how the work "challenges the boundaries of man" and other
phrases that to me are nonsense.

I get that it's easy to pick on Modern Art but I feel sticking to the
objective is still possible in that field.

------
westoncb
Would anybody who's familiar with some items from the collection care to give
a top three (or so) for those of us who don't know where to start?

------
dataslap
Uploading a scrapy crawler that downloads PDF books to github in a few hours,
gonna post the link here

~~~
spectaclepiece
Now I understand why it's so slow.

~~~
dataslap
It's slow cause things are quite large there (just saw a 2 gig book). I'm
using delays, don't worry - hence "in a few hours" <3 <3 <3

------
Antimachides
Does anyone have leads to other collections like this?

------
walterbell
What’s the policy on using these images in blog posts or social media?

~~~
TuringTest
It's well explained in their terms and conditions page.

Material not in the public domain they allow noncommercial reuse with some
caveats.

[https://www.metmuseum.org/information/terms-and-
conditions](https://www.metmuseum.org/information/terms-and-conditions)

~~~
walterbell
Thanks. Would be nice if the CC0 images could be found via
[https://search.creativecommons.org](https://search.creativecommons.org)

~~~
acabal
You can search metmuseum.org itself and they have a filter for public domain
paintings. (Use the search bar at the top then after searching click the "The
Collection" tab, and the filter will appear.)

------
hoerzu
I had the idea of Google selfie Art a few years ago and did it with a small
team for a museum in Hamburg (open data). I would love to do it for the MET
museum as well. I tried some real time face tracking in opencv aswell. The app
is called zeitblick. It’s more or less a prototype, maybe some of you will
have a joy for interacting with art data creatively :)

------
tenaciousDaniel
I'm in the process of creating a web app for exploring art along historical
timelines, and was wanting to pair each work up with critique/theory writings
that reference it. This is exactly what I need. Thanks for posting!

------
Spooky23
I’m surprised that they don’t charge, especially given the high quality.

When you visit, they give you a real hard sell and guilt trip for their
“recommended donation”. They should make access to this a perk of membership.

~~~
Gargoyle
Maybe there's some accounting thing where each download helps them meet a
charitable requirement or something.

Or maybe they take their educational mission seriously and this is a really
low marginal cost way to do it.

------
platz
hrmm, some of the reproductions in the photography books are of pretty poor
quality.

------
cafard
Wow! Thank you.

------
vrij
Didn't know that MetArt is so old...

~~~
simplyluke
The met was established in 1870.

~~~
hutzlibu
He was referring to a different "MetArt". Not worksafe ...

