Automatic Image Recognition App Finds the Most Popular Artworks on Instagram

Shortly before Christmas of last year, Screenlab, a Swedish startup company originally specializing in motion tracking for Augmented Reality, repurposed their algorithms to search for artworks in Instagram photos. Using indexing robots monitoring some 4,300 museums around the globe, Instagram photos are passed through an image recognition server that identifies and indexes artworks. The result is a rapidly expanding art database searchable by location, artist, and keywords through the Art Now app.

The name was chosen to reflect the nature of the database as it describes the current state of the museum art world, as seen through Instagram. The pace of the posts using hashtags like #art, #instaart or #followart can be blindingly fast making casual browsing and Instagram art exploration hard. This is where Art Now comes in and serves the role as an Instagram art digest.

Art Now currently finds 3,200 photos of artworks per day, which are either indexed and grouped with one of the 128,000 already identified artworks, or labelled as a new find. At the moment, 550 new artworks are added to the database per day on average.

Since measurements began in October 2014, "Starry Night" by Vincent van Gogh at the Museum of Modern Art in New York has been the most popular artwork. On weekly average, Art Now finds about 105 photos of "Starry Night", but during the Christmas holiday it was registered as often as 250 times per week. See video: http://bit.ly/1FASa31

The runner-up artworks can be seen in the Art Now app, available for download via the App Store: http://apple.co/1C2oZIR

Contact:
Magnus Axholt
[email protected]
+46-708-444-428