Google Open Gallery

Google just announced a tool called Google Open Gallery to help artists showcase their work in online virtual exhibitions. 

To set up an exhibition, you upload high res images and explanatory captions. The interface allows viewers a variety of ways to look at your artwork, including scalable views and a clever compare-and-contrast feature.

Viewers can sort the work by medium, person, place, date, or other parameters. All the exhibitions seem to fit within a standardized graphic design format. 

The promo video suggests that the tool might be used not only by artists and photographers, but also by museum directors and collectors who want to share their holdings. Whether hackers can delve into the code to extract the high res files is a question that I would wonder about. 

Here's the Google Open Gallery website, and an article in the LA Times about it. Right now the ability to set up a virtual gallery requires an invitation, which you can sign up for.

Thanks, Bryn