Art, culture & history images

ArtFinder aims to inspire everyone to find - and find out more about - fine art.

It is focused on building a much needed ‘home’ for art on the web, as well as on mobile phones and on tablet devices such as the iPad. ArtFinder’s searchable digital catalogue of paintings, sculptures, and art-related media currently stands at 250,000 works, and this is growing steadily as more partners come on board. The site also contains essays on artists, artworks and artistic movements, making it a useful free art discovery resource.

Creating a profile on the ArtFinder website enables you to ‘collect’ your favourite artworks, and share them via Facebook, Twitter or email. As it learns what you like, the site can recommend other artworks that suit your taste, as well as helping you to discover artowrk through innovative recomendation engines including a random image generator and 'magic tour' which shows you images based on a quick selection of your preferences. All of these social elements allow greater opportunity for works to be discovered, enjoyed and shared by a global audience.

With its app publishing programme for smartphones and tablets (zero cost to the museum or gallery, revenues are shared), and its print on demand services, Artfinder is addressing the major challenge faced by arts management professionals, i.e. how to open up new revenue channels while continuing to broaden public access.

Read Guardian Feature - ArtFinder brings social media to art 

www.artfinder.com