CulturePics - custom images from cultural collections

Size: 222x180 px More like this

1 ticket Regatta Point to Strahan, Transport Department Rail Branch (1947)
09-5071-4
The BL King’s Topographical Collection: "View of the SUBTERRANEOUS RUINS of MÆCENAS'S VILLA at TIVOLI "
Hamilton Public Library, OntarioFollow  The Corner of King and James Street, 1960s
British Library digitised image from page 58 of "History of the United States of America: ... to the present time [Drawn from Hinton's History, Holmes' 'Annals,' etc.] By T. P. Shaffner [assisted by C. Ball? and others] . Illustrated with steel engravings

What does it do?

At its simplest level CulturePics is rather like placehold.it or placekittens.com - you type in a specially formatted url and it gives you an image the size you want. But the difference here is that the images are sourced from thousands of the best images from the world's leading public collections. You also get to explore by collection and filter by tag, so if you happen to want lots of pictures of dogs from the National Media Museum or soldiers from the Australian War Memorial collection they're all just a few clicks away. Or maybe you're after a wide banner or a square picture to fill a particular spot?

Once you've found what you're looking for there are options to get the link for the image, download it, or copy the html code to embed it into your website or blog*, either in simple form or with a title and source as a caption

Right now it's just images from Flickr Commons, but the plan is to also include the likes of Europeana, DPLA and Trove, and any other easily accessible collections anyone can think of.

* please note that although these images have all been categorised as 'No known copyright restrictions' it is important that users read the Rights Statement on Flickr.

How does it work?

CulturePics taps into the library of thousands of images on Flickr Commons thanks to their API. When you give it some dimensions, and optionally a specific collection or tag, it finds the image that most closely matches the proportions (aspect ratio) and makes a special copy just for you.

Here are a few examples:

*rather than try and guess the collection or image IDs, use the search to find an image you want to use, then pick up the link by clicking 'Get this!'

Unlike other services, all the images served up have embedded metadata attributing the original source and so on. Or at least they will when I get that bit finished!

It was built as a quick experiment over a weekend. If you've got any thoughts, please get in touch.
@jamesinealing catchingtherain.com


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