Glynor, RobOK
thank you for your interest in my art collection and sorry for the delay, I simply missed your posts.
The tree view displayed shows my art collection consisting of more than 16'000 paintings.
Where did I get them from? It started when I was searching for some information about an artist on the internet a few years ago. I realized that there were many artworks on the internet and quite a number of great sites. Unfortunately it was very tedious to enjoy them. You always had to click on a thumbnail to get a large display of an image, then the next thumbnail and so on.
I just felt it would be easier to download the files to my hard disk. Around that time J River started developing MC9 and added the handling of images and a very flexible tagging system allowing to define user specific fields.
The main difficulty is that an image alone without inofrmation is quite useless, so I had to download the accompanying information as well. Technically it meant to download html files and extract the needed information. I developed a number of scripts that extracted the information to be used in tags and converted it to MPL playlists which got then imported into MC9/10/11.
One of the reasons I do not use MC12 exclusively is that the import of MPL playlists does not seem to work any longer, which is a very easy way to import external tag information.
Also statistics was much better and more flexible in MC9/10.
Usually I store the following information: period, artist, title of the artwork, paint year, paint size, paint style, gallery, country of the gallery, sometimes a few things more like typical periods of an artist. Currently I have over 16'000 paintings of 142 artists hanging in 954 galleries, museums and private collections located in 86 countries. The top runners are Van Gogh (2153 paintings), Renoir (1280), Monet (1249), Pissarro (832), Gauguin (650), Degas (627), Cézanne (587), Manet (274), Picasso (257), Dali (240), Rembrandt (188), Rubens (127), Kandinsky (86) and many others. The periods range from Gothic Art, Italian and Northern Renaissance, Rococo, Classicicism, Romanticism, Impressionism, Expressionism, Cubism, Fauvism, Surrealism, Abstract, Dadaism etc. Quality is not uniform and ranges from 800x600 upwards. The images display very well on a 1024x768 beamer and on my 1280x1024 screen, wide screens and notebook screens.
Scanning images from books is quite a tedious task, as you never get the original colors with a lot of extra work. Personally I do not care much for exact color reproduction as I can easily identify myself with an artwork.
One of the amazing things of such an art collection is the slide show effect. Watching the paintings of an artist sorted by paint-year gives a very profound insight in the artistic development of an artist, You can ask things such as "Who painted what in a specific year?" or things as "which paintings are hanging in which museum?" - good for planning city trips, and for art parties!
I sold the collection a few times to art lovers. I do this by installing them a trial version of MC that they have to buy themselves.
The two main things that MC lacks to be a perfect instrument for my art collection are:
1) better and more configurable display of caption information
2) configurable framing of images
And of course:
1) Ongoing support of import of MPL files or any other easy import mechanism
2) Better statistics (some SQL similar feature: search and count)
If you want to know more, you may email me!
