Met Museum Art Randomizer

Changelog

12 25 2024 - Made buttons bigger and easier to interact with. This should make it much more useful on small phone screens. The information is still small, but you have to visit the page anyway so meh.

Known Bug With Web Version: The web version cannot download the image due to itch.io security (which is sensible). All the web version of the app will do is provide the art info and a button to open the actual MET site for the chosen art piece. If you want to view the art in the application, use the downloadable executable version. It hardly matters really, as my display code is so bad I recommend using the website links anyway.

Bug with android version, it wouldn't install on my device after downloading. I have removed it for now, use the web version on a phone till I fix this. Apologies for the link button size, this is all very alpha.

About this thing

A silly app to pull a random art from the The Met Collection, which can be browsed in a more sensible way at this url: https://www.metmuseum.org/art/collection

I wanted a way to see a random art piece for inspiration and fun. There wasn't a visit a random artwork button on the website.

But...the met has a database listing all their artwork collection, all open to public use. So about 2 days of filtering the database and learning how to use html requests later, here we are.

But why?

The results are filtered down from the full collection by two criteria:

1. The only art it can find is the ones tagged Public Domain.
2. The only art it can find are the ones that include a photo.

This was done because I wanted to make sure anything shown can be used by whatever project you needed this kind of art selection for, such as a game jam. I also skip art without a photo because while the name and author are fascinating information, we are really here for the artwork itself. These are two filter requirements that were difficult to make the default MET website do.

About updating the data

The database used by the app is from November 12, 2024. If art was added after that date, it cannot be pulled up by the application. I didn't want to hammer the MET calls with local update requests from every user. The only way to do this kind of filtering is downloading the entire 200+gig sheet of data, and filtering that down to build a new database. It is much better for everyone's bandwidth to do this manually in excel instead of dynamically in the application.

If you really want to update the program's list in the future, you can add any missing art ids to the art_ids.txt file. It is simply a list of numbers all on their own rows, these are the object ids from the met database, and one is randomly selected when the button is clicked.