ARTLENS

While informative, it’s only at times. A lot of the “scan” items need updating as they don’t register in the app. Some that say there is audio to listen to, but there is no audio. Felt it was choppy and got frustrating to use when trying to learn. Also annoying a lot of you save while there isn’t saved properly when home.

I spent two days submersed in the fabulous collection at the Cleveland Museum of Art. We came in from out of town to study works in the American wing and contemporary collection. Rather than photographing the paintings and side notes I opted to use the museums app ART LENS. Spent alot of time looking and marking up the paintings in their LIKE 💜 folder. Goal was to look back at the app and do further research at home. Guess what...the darn app only works inside the museum! It only loads to 60% at home. So now I am back from vacation with no research notes or photos. The Cleveland Museum of Art experience was out standing. But my goal was to come back to the art studio to do research. I am left so disappointed that the app failed.

Can't wait to try this on-site. For now, I can at least say the at-home content is impressive! Very high-res images, which you can save as Favorites to come back to. You can navigate the museum map without being there. (One question: I see user-created tours... is it possible to create tours using the app?) Some details on the data loading, so people know what to expect: the app grows to about 355MB (and I'd guess that will slowly increase in future), so that's the space you'll need on your iPad. The downloading of all those images does indeed take a while, so do it before you go to the museum! Launch the app and wait for the download bar to finish. A couple good things about this big image download step: 1) if you quit the app, the download stops, but it resumes where you left off next time you launch it. And 2) you don't have to keep your screen turned on to do the download. I launched the app, turned the screen off, and later everything had downloaded anyway. Request: I'd love to have an iPhone version, since I always have my iPhone with me!