Helping the nation's art be found

Art UK is the online home of every public art collection in the UK: over a million artworks from more than 3,000 collections. Most of them have never been catalogued by subject. A painting of a harbour at dusk is invisible to anyone searching for “boats” or “sunset” unless someone writes that down.

Volunteers have been doing exactly that for years through Art UK's Tagger project, one artwork at a time. Their work is the foundation this pilot builds on. The backlog, though, is enormous, and it grows with every newly digitised work.

AI looks at each artwork and suggests tags for what it sees. Nothing the AI says is taken on trust: a tag only counts once people have agreed with it. You look at the artwork, keep the suggestions that are right, reject the ones that are wrong, and add anything the AI missed. When two people independently agree, the tag is confirmed; when they disagree, it goes to Art UK's team to settle.

Tags you add yourself go through the same mill: the AI double-checks them against the image, other taggers vote on them, and anything doubtful gets a human review. Every confirmed tag flows back to Art UK with a full record of how it was decided, ready to make search better for everyone.

Tag one artwork at a time, or pick a tag and sweep through a whole grid of works at once; switch between the two whenever you like. If you'd rather wander, Explore searches the collection by describing what you want to see, and Match finds works that look like an image you give it.

This is a closed six-month pilot covering around 43,000 openly licensed artworks, run by Art UK with Accelerate Outcome. What the pilot learns, about tag quality and about what makes tagging feel worth doing, will shape how this reaches Art UK's full collection.

No account is needed. Your device gets an anonymous identifier so you aren't shown the same artwork twice; see the privacy notice for what's stored and for how long.