Google Arts & Culture’s new Pet Portraits feature will find your pet’s twin from the tens of thousands of works at the app’s partner art institutions.
Pet Portraits is the latest tool to become available in the free Google Arts & Culture app and a natural follow up to the Art Selfie feature that rolled out in 2018.
Art Selfie encouraged users to upload photographs of themselves, their friends and their family to find famous matches from around the world in art. Now, Pet Portraits makes it possible for your pet dog, cat or horse to get in on the fun, too.
All you need to do is download the Google Arts & Culture app on your Android or iOS phone, hit the rainbow camera tab at the bottom of the screen and snap a photo of your best friend to see where their furry, feathery or scaly doppelgänger lived in art history.
Google’s trained computer vision algorithm will then determine where your pet is in the image, crop the background and match them with one of over tens of thousands of artworks from it’s collections.
Possible results include ancient Egyptian figurines, colourful Mexican street art, Chinese watercolours and more, though my personal favourite from Google’s gallery is definitely this wide-eyed cat clinging to a tree.
Once you’ve got your match, you can save the results as a single image or animate them together to generate a gif to share on social media with the hashtag #PetPortraits. You can also go on to learn more about the pets behind the art in the Arts & Culture app.
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Pet Portraits is compatible with cats, dogs, birds, fish, reptiles, rabbits and horses, but there’s no mention of exotic creatures or farm animals, so if you’ve got a pet goat or a baby tiger at home you might be out of luck.
The feature is available to try in the Google Arts & Culture app right now.
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Editorial independence
Editorial independence means being able to give an unbiased verdict about a product or company, with the avoidance of conflicts of interest. To ensure this is possible, every member of the editorial staff follows a clear code of conduct.
Professional conduct
We also expect our journalists to follow clear ethical standards in their work. Our staff members must strive for honesty and accuracy in everything they do. We follow the IPSO Editors’ code of practice to underpin these standards.
