New Google camera makes copying artworks a snap

In its first five years, the Google Cultural Institute scanned and archived 200 works of art in super-high-resolution gigapixel images. Now in just the past few months, it has managed to scan another 1,000 – some of them in India.

The sudden expansion is thanks to a new camera developed by Google, simply called the Art Camera. It's designed to be far simpler to use than other camera setups, making it easier for museums and other institutions to start digitizing the art and documents in their collection. And critically, it's also much faster.

"The capture time has been reduced drastically," Marzia Niccolai, technical program manager at the Cultural Institute, told The Verge. "Previously it could take almost a day to capture an image. To give you an idea, now if you have a one metre by one metre painting, it would take 30 minutes."

After a few years of work, Google has built 20 units of the Art Camera and is lending them out for digitization. The camera works like this: it's set up in front of a wall where a painting is hung; its operator then points the camera at each edge of the image; once the camera knows how big of a space it's working with, it'll set off to work, automatically moving inch by inch, taking extreme closeups. Those closeups are then sent off to Google's servers to be turned into a single gigapixel file, ready to look at just a few hours later.

Door for Australian Technical College (1889) Gigapixel by Lucien Henry / Museum of Applied Arts and Sciences

Prior to the Art Camera, either the Cultural Institute or the organisations it worked with had to pay to bring in a third party with image-scanning equipment. Now that Google has its own cameras, the process also becomes much cheaper.

It isn't charging organisations that want to use the camera, encouraging them to take advantage of it. Niccolai says that the Cultural Institute has already lent it out to organisations across the globe, including in Brazil, India, and Hong Kong.

The Art Camera has some critical limitations, however. While it's a simple way to archive something mostly flat - like a painting - it can't handle 3D objects or anything particularly large. For that, Google will still have to bring in other tech.

The new scans are available at the Cultural Institute's website. Among them, one can find works from Monet, O'Keeffe, and Van Gogh, alongside other well-known names.