The art frame

What the art frame is

The art widget shows one work at a time, full screen, the way a frame shows a painting. It is not the photo frame with different pictures in it, and two differences carry the weight.

It fits rather than fills. A photograph cropped to a screen is still that photograph; a painting cropped to a screen is a different painting, and that crop is the single thing that makes a digital art frame look cheap. What is left over becomes a mat, the way a framed print has one.

It also moves, imperceptibly. A screen that is on for sixteen hours a day will etch a still image into itself over months. The drift is slow enough that nobody consciously sees it and large enough that no pixel holds one value for long.

Where collections come from

Art is organised into collections, and the Art page in the top bar shows two shelves. What separates them is who made them, not how they behave on a wall.

• Your collections — built from images you upload. Nobody else ever sees them, published or not.
• Our catalogue — collections we curate. Some are free and already yours; others carry a one-off price or a monthly subscription.
• A collection you no longer have access to stops playing. If you cancel a subscription it keeps working until the end of the period you have already paid for.

Making a collection of your own

1. Open Art and press New collection

   You are asked for a title. The collection appears on the “Your collections” shelf straight away, empty.

2. Press Upload works

   Several files at once is fine. Each work is stored at full size, its pixel dimensions are measured, and its colours are worked out once so that no screen ever has to sample the image itself. Anything over 40 MB, or in a format Mirra does not accept, is skipped.

3. Fill in the details of each work

   Click a work to open Details. Title, Artist, Year, Medium, Credit line, Source URL and Licence. The credit line matters: it is the condition a museum releases an image under, and the screen shows it whether or not the licence compels it.

4. Give the collection a description

   Press Description. One or two lines, shown wherever the collection is offered. It is also what the search box on this page matches against — somebody hunting for seascapes will not remember that the collection is called “Salt and Weather”.

Search collections

Matches the title, the artist and the description on both shelves at once.Default: Empty

All / Mine / Available to me / Free / Paid

Which shelf you are looking at. “Available to me” spans both ways of having something — bought outright and subscribed — because from the wall's point of view they are the same.Default: All

Shape

Any shape, Suits my screens, Landscape or Portrait. “Suits my screens” keeps anything that is not actively awkward, including mixed collections and anything Mirra could not measure. It is offered only once a screen is paired, since before that it would mean nothing.Default: Any shape

An account can keep 40 collections of its own, and a collection can hold 500 works. Our curated collections are ours and do not count towards that.

Choosing what hangs on the wall

A collection sitting on the Art page shows nothing. Pointing a screen at it is a separate step, and it is per screen — one household can have a Hokusai in the hall and its own photographs of a holiday in the study.

1. Open Screens and pick the screen

   Then choose the scene the frame belongs in.

2. Under Add widget, find Photos & art and press + Art

   It arrives filling the grid — twelve columns by eight rows — because this is the widget people give a whole wall to. An art frame cropped into a corner is a photo frame.

3. Choose the collection

   The picker lists everything this household may display: its own collections and whatever it holds from the catalogue.

4. Set the framing, the mat and the caption

   Then save the scene. The screen picks it up without being restarted.

Everything the art widget can be set to

Collection

Which collection plays on this screen.Default: None until you pick one

Seconds per piece

How long each work is held before the next one.Default: 90

Framing

“Whole work, matted” shows the entire picture and fills the leftover space with a mat. “Fill the screen (crops)” fills the panel and loses the edges. Cropping is the option you have to choose, deliberately.Default: Whole work, matted

Shape

“Every work in the collection”, or “Only works that suit this frame”. A portrait painting in a wide frame is mostly mat; matching skips the ones that would float — unless too few are left, in which case it shows them all rather than an empty wall.Default: Every work in the collection

Mat

What fills the space around a work that does not match the screen's shape: from the artwork, black, charcoal, bone or white. “From the artwork” blurs the piece itself into the margin, so it reads as a mount rather than a letterbox.Default: From the artwork

Caption

Title, artist and year; title only; or nothing at all.Default: Title, artist and year

Slow drift

Moves the image imperceptibly. On is recommended, because a still picture left on a panel for months can etch itself into it.Default: On

Order

As arranged, or shuffled. Shuffling is stable for a given collection, so the order survives a re-render rather than jumping about.Default: As arranged

Suit the weather

Favours cool, muted works when it is grey and wet, and warmer ones in sun, using the colours measured when each work was stored. Falls back to the plain order when the forecast cannot be reached.Default: Off

Tint these lights

Named lights take their colour from whatever is on screen. A strip is laid out along the picture, left to right, and a single bulb takes its strongest colour. Only lights that are already on and can take a colour are touched, and they are put back when the frame stops.Default: None

Different art per person

When a screen recognises somebody, it shows their collection instead. Anyone not listed sees the collection chosen above.Default: Nobody listed

The colours behind the ambient mat and the light tinting are computed once, when a work is uploaded — as a flat palette and as eight bands across the picture. A seascape that is blue at one end and gold at the other lights a strip blue at one end and gold at the other, rather than averaging the two into brown.

Free, bought, subscribed — and what happens if you stop

Every collection in our catalogue carries its state on its card, because a price alone does not tell a button whether to say “Buy”, “Subscribed” or “Ends on the 3rd”.

• Free — yours already. Point a widget at it and it plays.
• Bought — yours to keep. A one-off payment, and it does not expire.
• Subscribed — a monthly payment, with a Cancel button beside it.
• Cancelled — plays until a stated date. Cancelling never blanks a wall the same afternoon.
• Payment failed — the card needs updating on the Plan page; the collection keeps playing while that is sorted out.
• Where a deployment has no payment provider configured, a priced collection shows its price and says payments are not set up here, rather than offering a button that would fail.

Cancelling a subscription is confirmed with a note about what happens next, but it is not reversible from that button — restarting means going through checkout again. What you have already paid for keeps playing until the period ends.

Shape: portrait, landscape and the mat between

A screen is mounted one way up and stays that way; a collection may be all portrait, all landscape, all square, or mixed. Mirra measures every work at upload and says something only when the answer would change a decision.

On the Art page, a line at the top tells you which way your own screens are mounted, and a catalogue card speaks up only when the fit is less than good. A row of green “fits your screen” labels on everything would bury the one warning worth reading. Inside a collection of your own, the shape of the whole set is stated once above the works, and each work carries its own shape on its thumbnail.

• All portrait — best on a screen mounted upright.
• All landscape — best on a screen mounted the usual way round.
• All square — suits a screen either way up.
• Mixed — some works will show with a wider mat, or the widget's Shape setting can skip the ones that would float.

What the screen reports, and what the mirror can tell you

The screen tells Mirra which piece it is currently showing. That is what lets the assistant answer “what am I looking at?” with the title, artist, year, medium and credit line of the thing actually on the wall — the server cannot work it out for itself, because the rotation is decided on the device.

What is showing right now is held in memory rather than written down. A screen changes picture every minute or two, and recording that would be thousands of rows a day about something only interesting at the moment it is asked.

On a collection you own, each work can also carry up to two minutes of your own recorded voice, made in the browser from the work's Details panel. When somebody asks the mirror about that piece, it can offer to play the recording instead of reading the metadata back.

Time on the wall is also counted towards paying artists whose collections are listed with us. What an artist is shown is their own earnings — never which households displayed their work.