Ryan's Journal

With the advent of a digital photo frame for playing slideshows, a fun new question: how to curate and obtain visual collections for display.

There are several immediate options: a selection of whatever I consider my best photos, photos from a particular event or timeframe, a set of friends, etc. The ever-wondrous web brings out several also-immediate options, with Apple's photocasting and flickr's friend feeds readily available for translation to my slideshow system (which, I might add, would also save on bandwidth... I didn't really implement the most intelligent caching system).

And then there are more educational and academic exercises: all of Picasso's paintings; all of Rodin or Monet or van Gogh's works; Alfred Stieglitz, Diane Arbus, or Ansel Adam's collected photographs; Alan Lee's Middle Earth sketches, or even old public domain films.

Do such fundamental collections exist? Online? For free? Is there some place I can retrieve moderately high resolution digital copies of all of Degas's work, or the best of Japanese woodcuts?

Does anybody have suggestions for an interesting collection? I've never taken any art history, and now's not a bad time to learn a bit, if the rest of the world freely shares its artistic treasures.