IIIF on ESP32: countless artworks for free
IIIF is how major museums expose their image collections online for free. You can specify an image resolution, and the server produces JPEG files on demand. It's pretty neat.
So I brought it to p3a, my ESP32-P4 pixel-art frame. Hundreds of thousands of artworks from six institutions now stream straight to the device:
- Art Institute of Chicago
- Rijksmuseum (Amsterdam)
- Victoria & Albert Museum (London)
- Wellcome Collection (London)
- SMK / Statens Museum for Kunst (Copenhagen)
- Harvard Art Museums
IIIF itself is standardized, but each museum's discovery layer is idiosyncratic. AIC has its own search API, Rijks needs a Linked-Art resolver walk, Harvard needs a BYOK key... so each museum gets its own dispatcher.
p3a runs on the Waveshare ESP32-P4-WIFI6-Touch-LCD-4B (720×720 24-bit IPS). It plays animated WebP/GIF, static PNG/JPEG, and connects directly to Makapix Club and Giphy. Links are in the comment below.