Image Library Search
Opening the World’s largest photographic collection of art for discovery
Pimloc worked with the Courtauld Institute of Art to open their collection for discovery. The Courtauld Institute has the World’s largest photographic collection of art going back over 500 years. They are in the process of digitising their collection, and estimate it would take over 20 years to manually annotate all 5M images.
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The artworks within the collection have very limited meta-data that comes from notes that have been scribed onto the artwork boxes over the years.
Where subject matter is annotated, it can be very restrictive: ‘More than 4 figures, without horses, without boats’, ‘ Ships facing right’, ‘Ships not facing right’.
Search for objects within images and video
Pimloc’s Image Library Solution provides instant searching of the Courtauld collection without any need for manual tagging; immediately opening the collection for discovery.
The Solution allows expert users to further improve the search-ability of the collection by directly adding their art knowledge into the system. Users can improve search results and create new classifications for more specialist objects, artists, styles, and people, as they search and navigate.
Rather than being constrained to a set dictionary of terms, users can search the collection for anything they can think of.
Users can also search the collection by uploading an image to find similar works. Searching using images provides a fun and simple way to start exploring the collection; children can upload images of themselves or their artworks to find their look-a-likes, or see similar styles of art from history.
The Pimloc Image Library Solution can be applied to any image or video collection without the need for tagging or any meta-data.
It can run locally, in your AWS instance, or on-premise servers.
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The Pimloc Image Library Solution has been used by BBC’s Fake or Fortune to try and identify the subject of a lost Gainsborough (and to find Fiona Bruce’s historic art doppelganger)