Image quality
On aspect of finding media on the internet is the quality of images. The majority of freely available images will be low resolution, and as a result one looses the subtilties that some artist achieve in their works. For that reason many modern artists will provide medium quality images on their own sites, along with high resolution previews of some detail. This is a reasonable compromise, even if they also watermark the images. Being able to purchase the original artwork may be outside our budget but postcards are a nice alternative at times.
Once material moves into the public domain, one would expect things to improve, and on the whole that is the case, except that the quality of the original capture of the image can leave a lot to be desired. Many galleries and art collectons are taking the time to properly light pictures in their collection when photographing them for their catalogue and then making that catalogue available on line. In the UK this is being further enhanced by the the ArtUK project which is compiling a central catalogue from the individual catalogues as they come available. Since this also covers images that are sitll under copyright, the 'How you can use this image' tag provides information on restrictions to use. On the whole the images in this archive are of a good standard, where the original artwork is in a reasonable condition. Some works have not been well maintained however, and have perhaps reached a stage where even a skilled restorer would be unable to establish the original vibrance of a work. Even where the original work has been reasonably well maintained, a poorly lit picture will fail to capture even the current quality, and many of the images in archives such as wikimedia commons while of a high resolution, tend to be rather poorly colour matched to the original artworks.
( TODO - provide an couple of examples of the range of quality of images from a number of sources )
The intention is to build up an index of the better quality catalogues of art bypassing the general searches that we have already identified as poor starting points at times. The better quality sources should also provide a more comprehensive set of tag data on an image such as when a painting was first shown, possibly who the subject(s) are in addition to the artist and title. But a second set of metadata relating to the provenance of the electronic image would be useful, especially going forward. If a photograph of a work was taken back in 1960 and subsequent pictures in 2000 and today any deteriation in the original can be tracked. This obviously needs care that the lighting contitions are matched reasonably well and modern lights may well result in a different picture to a 60 year old one even when there has been no change to the condition of the original.