Photographing Artwork for Yallery
We recognize one of the largest barriers preventing artists and collectors from placing all of their art on Yallery is a lack of photographs (or perhaps, a lack of quality photographs) of their art. Some artists have laser scans made of each artwork they create, so they may make high quality reproductions while other artists make quick photographs of their art before they are packed up and shipped off to a gallery or show.
Collectors and art owners are often told to document all of their possessions in the process of insuring their personal property, but art deserves special attention as there are unique identifying details that must be preserved and recalled during the insurance recovery process should the artwork ever be lost or stolen. The quality of insurance-inspired art photography is often very low.
Some collectors hire professional art photographers to document their collections. However, most art owners and collectors can’t afford this type of service. We believe high-quality collector-generated art photographs can be accomplished if a little time is invested and some simple rules are followed.
If you’re on a budget, smaller Items like glasswork, pottery and jewelry can be placed in a small homemade lightbox made from a large cardboard box with a hole in each side for a light, a sheet of poster board and two lights. The following image of an Aaronson Noon vase was photographed in such a box for my own Yallery Mosaic:
A great resource for art photography hints is over at Empty Easel:
How to Photograph your Artwork for a Portfolio or the Internet
Yallery enables artist members to “overwrite” photographs of linked works supplied by collector and gallery members with “official artist photographs” in the interests of preserving the artist’s vision and expression.
Yallery’s Image Formats
The artwork ingestion process requires one image upload for each item. Each photograph should be at least 1024 pixels (wide) by 768 pixels (high). This is also the size of our maximum image size.
Once an artwork image is loaded into Yallery, our software creates a square tile-sized image that is 100 pixels by 100 pixels for use in the member’s Public Dashboard “Mosaic”. A square medium-sized image of 300 pixels by 300 pixels is also created, to be used in Artwork Info pop-up windows. Images are masked with transparent space if the original image is not square.
Yallery also generates a large “full size” image size that is calculated to be within 1024 pixels (wide) by 768 pixels (high), using the largest side dimensions as a guide. This image is not masked.