ArtScan: Museum Photos

I, like I’m sure many others, have thousands and thousands of photos stored between my phone and iCloud, and they’re totally unorganized. But now, with this app, at least I can make a small dent in that chaos— this app makes it easy to organize all of the photos I’ve taken of art I’ve liked over the years! It’s pretty seamless. Much smoother than throwing my pics into a reverse image search on Google. I’m not a huge fan of AI, but I think this is a good application— it’s not eroding my creativity, just replacing the drudgery of photo organization.

I have wanted this app to exist for so long, and it almost works— but, the AI component is a disaster. I take thousands of photos of exhibitions I see, at museums and galleries, and uploaded about 100 from various contexts as a trial. The app’s AI misidentified nearly all of them, and the troubling thing is how confidently it misidentifies! It adds all the details of other works by other artists. The option exists to replace it with the info from a photo of the wall label, but it doesn’t replace it altogether, it corrects the basics (artist, title, media) but leave all kinds of other incorrect info intact, leaving you with a jumble of accurate and inaccurate that you’d have to check like a hawk and manually type in corrections. Promising premise— I really, really wanted this— but it simply isn’t useable right now. In fact, if you value attribution at all, it’s downright dangerous. If I could turn off the AI altogether and just use it to catalog my images, I’d be delighted!

I uploaded 3 of my fav paintings and it missed identification, also it asked me to free trial and then the prica was way too high for a hobby thing. There’s should be a basic free version just to organize, then if it really becomes your reference I can start thinking of educational value and pay for it, but given it missed like the winner of American Portrait Society 2025 Frances Bell and confused with a random artist, I doubt the reliability of this app and I don’t want to embarrass myself. So TYNT I don’t think it’s worth especially cuz the trial implies too much work to get rid of it if you don’t like it and it’s a psychological pressure that made me delete the app even before trying it for real. Don’t understand why developers lose awareness of being a customer and make this approach error and basically lose 98% of their customers. good luck tho.