When Google Arts & Culture released its “Art Selfie” feature in 2018, it instantly became a hit. In its first three years, the app sifted through more than 120 million selfies, matching faces with doppelgängers across art history. Most people have used—or are at least familiar with—Art Selfie, but not many seem to know about its “pawesome” counterpart.
Originally launched in 2021, Pet Portraits invites users to discover their pet’s very own art double by uploading images of their dog, cat, fish, bird, reptile, horse, or rabbit. Like Art Selfie, artworks are pulled from the collections of partner institutions around the world, including the Rijksmuseum in Amsterdam, the Phillips Collection in D.C., the National Portrait Gallery in Australia, and New York’s Metropolitan Museum of Art, among others. Thanks to its sprawling database, Pet Portraits offers thousands of art historical companions for pets, whether it be an ancient Egyptian figurine, a Chinese watercolor, Mexican street art, or Renaissance painting.
Pet Portraits relies upon a trained computer vision algorithm to locate a pet’s look-alike. First, the algorithm identifies where the animal is within the image and crops it accordingly. Afterward, a machine learning algorithm scans tens of thousands of artworks for something that looks similar to the pet.
“You need to find simple ways to get people interested in art,” Amit Sood, founder of the Google Art Project, said of the Art Selfie launch in 2018. “The people who are already committed to learning about art are going to take the time to come to your museums, to learn the academic articles. They are going to do it anyway. But that is a tiny part of the population. If you want to reach people like me, or at least how I used to be before, you have to find a reason for them to want to engage.”
Both Art Selfie and Pet Portraits encourage that exact sense of engagement. Once results are revealed, users can learn more about the work and the artist behind it, receiving an approachable yet informative art history lesson. After all, Google Arts & Culture has marketed Art Selfie and, by extension, Pet Portraits as a “playful way to discover art.”
Pet Portraits is available for download on Google Play and the Apple App Store. To learn more about the app, visit Google Arts & Culture.
Google Arts & Culture’s Pet Portraits app allows people to match images of their furry friends with “pawesome” artworks around the world.
All images via Google Arts & Culture.
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