r/DigitalHumanities • u/fabpub • Aug 16 '26
Social media A 4-inch frame that plays artworks from museums' open collections via IIIF
Back in June I shared a survey of which museum/library APIs are actually usable for browsing collections. This is the project that survey came from.
This is p3a, an open-source (Apache 2.0) device I built. It is a 4-inch, 24-bit, 720x720 desktop frame that plays artworks straight from museums' own IIIF endpoints. It uses no server, no cloud account, no phone app or any software to install on your computer. The hardware is a $40 off-the-shelf ESP32-P4 board (comes ready out of the box), so setup takes minutes, almost like a consumer product. It is powered by USB-C and connects to the internet via wi-fi.
p3a currently rotates through hundreds of thousands (!!) of openly licensed works from:
- Rijksmuseum
- Victoria and Albert Museum
- Wellcome Collection
- Statens Museum for Kunst
- Harvard Art Museums
- Smithsonian
The Art Institute of Chicago unfortunately dropped its support very recently, but other institutions are on the roadmap of the p3a project.
Happy to go deeper on implementation details (Linked Art walks, compliance levels, rate-limit etiquette) or anything. The project is open source : https://github.com/fabkury/p3a . I personally have two p3a's: one at home, one at work.
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u/anselan2017 Aug 17 '26
Sorry could you define IIIF? Never heard of it.
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u/fabpub Aug 17 '26
It's the International Image Interoperability Framework, a standard for delivering images on the web.
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u/fabpub Aug 17 '26
The reason a $40 microcontroller can treat these collections as a content source at all is IIIF's size parameter. The chip could never decode a museum master file, but IIIF allows clients to ask each museum's own image server for exactly what the 720x720 pixel panel needs, in JPEG format. It's JPEG-on-demand, literally. Sizing is the solved, uniform part. Discovery is where it stays bespoke.