3D Printing and painting Zachary Levi as SHAZAM!sponsored by Skillshare! The first 500 to use get a 2 MONTH TRIAL!This was a f. Explore a world of art and culture Online art education at home and in museums. Learn from the world’s best curators and educators any time, anywhere. The Song Sleuth app was just released for iOS, with an Android version in the works for this fall, and it not only helps people become better birders by helping them identify birds by their songs. Think Shazam, but for images, rather than sounds. Google’s Goggles is already ahead of the game, and Plink’s expertise will be used “not just for paintings or book covers, but for.

Shazam is one of my favorite apps. If I’m in a coffee shop or bar and hear a track I like, I can instantly find out what it is and check out the artist later on Apple Music. Smartify aims to do the same job for art, aiming to educate art gallery visitors and gallery owners alike, reports New Scientist.

The app uses image recognition to identify scanned artworks and provide people with additional information about them. Users can then add the works to their own digital collection […]

Museums and galleries that sign up will also be able to access demographic information about people who use Smartify and the artworks they interact with, which they could use to inform their marketing and advertising.

The bad news is that the app will initially be extremely limited, covering selected artworks at just four galleries.

The app will launch in May for selected artworks at the Louvre in Paris, France, and the Metropolitan Museum of Art in New York, and all the artworks at the Rijksmuseum in Amsterdam and the Wallace Collection in London.

The good news is you won’t need to be standing in front of the original painting to learn more about it: the app will work just as well with a print, even a postcard. So if you’re sitting in your new date’s apartment and they have one of the prints on the wall, you’ll be able to quickly turn yourself into an expert on it while they’re getting the drinks.

Smartify is hoping to quickly sign up more museums and art galleries, but is unlikely to succeed with all.

“Many visitors go to museums to have an unplugged experience,” says Kevin Walker at the Royal College of Art in London. He thinks visitors should look up from their phones and put their trust in gallery curators when it comes to viewing works of art.

The app is a free download from the App Store.

Via TNW

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A new app wants to make recognizing famous paintings as easy as pointing your smartphone at them.

At least, that's the goal for Smartify, a free app that has been described as 'Shazam for the art world,' writes Gunseli Yalcinkaya for Dezeen, in reference to the popular smartphone app that can recognize millions of songs in just seconds.

Art museums around the world have worked to digitize their collections in recent years, enabling apps like Smartify to look for 'visual fingerprints' in paintings that can be quickly checked against a growing database of artwork as paintings and sculptures increasingly move from the walls to the web.

Scanning a painting on the app does more than just identify it to a user, it also brings up a wealth of information about the art and its creator beyond what the label displays. (This expanded context that can be utilized in the museums or at home promises to prove exciting to some and potentially problematic to others.) The app also allows people to save their favorite artworks into a personal collection, allowing them to share pieces that have moved them with their friends and family.

Smartify's collection of participating institutions includes London's National Gallery, the Los Angeles County Museum of Art, the Metropolitan Museum of Art and Moscow's Pushkin Museum of Fine Arts. (Smartify is also available for Smithsonian's Freer Gallery of Art and the Arthur M. Sackler Gallery.) It has also collaborated with the Wikimedia Foundation to expand its image recognition abilities and speed.

Shazam For Free

Smartify's founders argue the app can benefit institutions by giving them valuable demographic data about who is looking at their art so they can design better marketing and educational campaigns, reports Matt Reynolds for New Scientist. Currently 30 museums are partners of the app, and it is looking to expand to more institutions worldwide.

Shazam For Paintings Free

The goal, the founders say, is to transform smartphones from something that many museums struggle with into a tool they can harness.