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Galleries for Education

Since launching Galeryst two years ago, one of the most interesting use cases has been for educational purposes. I have seen schools, colleges, and educational institutions at all levels creating galleries to share lessons, student artwork, and present projects. The most inspiring aspect for me, has been how primary and secondary schools across the globe have found and taken advantage of Galeryst.

Many students, teachers, and schools have created unlisted galleries and have provided links to their communities, but others have made their work public so the whole world can see the talent of their students. Here are a few:

AP Art students at The International School of the Port of Spain
AP Art students at The International School of the Port of Spain

The International School of the Port of Spain in Trinidad and Tobago create galleries for student artwork at all levels Lower Elementary School, Upper Elementary School, Middle School, and AP Art.

Primary 6-JC Wing of the Jakarta Nanyang School Artventures 2002 gallery

The Jakarta Nanyang School in Indonesia created a gallery for their students, JNY Artventure 2022.

Mount Compass Area School Art Exhibition 2023

Most recently the Mount Compass Area School in Australia created a school art exhibition.

The benefits of using Galeryst here for education are easy to see:

  1. An affordable way to exhibit the artwork, giving every piece the space it deserves.
  2. It is accessible from phones, tablets, computers, and VR Headsets in any modern web browser – nothing to install.
  3. Navigating a gallery is similar to playing a 3D computer game, so students of all ages will likely be familiar with the experience. You can even navigate around a gallery with a game controller.
  4. It blends technology with creativity in a way that is approachable to students of all ages – and their audience.
  5. It gives a school a way to exhibit artwork to its extended community of family and friends across the world.
  6. Galeryst generates galleries from Adobe Photoshop Lightroom albums and many schools get it as part of the Adobe Creative Cloud for Education or the Creative Cloud for Students and Teachers discount.
  7. Though you can share links to galleries across the web and social networks, Galeryst does not rely on any social networks or advertising companies for revenue or user profile management.

One of the technologies behind Galeryst is Babylon.js – a toolkit for writing 3D code for websites and games. Galeryst procedurally generates the code to build galleries based on the size of your albums in Lightroom. If your school wants to learn more about this interesting mix of art and coding, please reach out to me and I can help you design a STEAM curriculum around 3D coding with artwork. If you want to experiment with a code sample of what builds the foyer in Galeryst, take a look here.

a view of the BabylonJS playground with Typescript code on the left and a 3D view of the gallery foyer on the right.
BabylonJS Playground with the TypeScript code for the Galeryst Foyer.

Anyone can create a free gallery today with Galeryst – and you can do that using a free 7-day trial of Adobe Photoshop Lightroom. Give it a try today and make a place in the metaverse with your student’s artwork!

Create a Gallery for your school today and let your students show off their work to a worldwide audience.

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Gallery Show Beta Testing

We have been working on new functionality in Galeryst that enables anyone to host live gallery shows in the metaverse for the galleries on Galeryst. The host and the guests can move around the gallery for the show as they are represented by 3D avatars. The host can guide the guests around the gallery highlighting artworks and can even open a shared whiteboard in front of an artwork to explain it. All of this functionality is possible with a new Microsoft Teams app that we are currently beta testing.

Help us craft a metaverse that is about a community sharing artwork and creativity worldwide.

Michael Scherotter, creator of Galeryst
Dinosaur and avatar (on right) in a virtual gallery.
Dinosaur and avatar (on right) in a virtual gallery.

If you are interested in testing this as a guest or as an artist, please sign up today for a 45-minute test meeting on Microsoft Teams. You can participate in a variety of ways:

  • From the web in Firefox, Chrome, Edge, or Safari
  • From a PC or Mac using the Microsoft Teams desktop app
  • From an Android or iOS device using the Microsoft Teams app in the iOS app store or Google Play store

Galeryst generate 3D virtual galleries from Adobe Photoshop Lightroom albums enabling any artist to create a beautiful gallery to share their artwork with the world. Create your free gallery today on Galeryst.com.

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New Gallery Analytics

The various visualizations of public galleries on Galeryst

Almost every artist who has a gallery wants to know who visits it and what artwork that the visitors find most interesting. If a gallery is virtual, like it is on Galeryst, an artist also would want to know where in the world the visitors are coming from. That is now possible on Galeryst! We’ve been working on a new analytics page on Galeryst that shows data about public galleries and artwork shared in them. For Galeryst subscribers, we are also showing visitor traffic and their engagement with the artwork in their galleries. Note, that there are many more non-public galleries on Galeryst that we do not share information about on the analytics page.

Galleries chart
All the public galleries on Galeryst

For the data visualization, we are using a tool called SandDance created by Microsoft Research and released through the Microsoft Garage, Microsoft’s small-scale innovation group. It is now available as an open-source component here. We chose SandDance because it offers a poetic 3D visualization with animation that went well with the 3D nature of Galeryst. SandDance invites users to explore the data visually in a fun way.

Artworks chart
All the artwork in public galleries arranged by latitude and longitude

Visitor Analytics

When a visitor enters a gallery, moves around, and clicks on artwork, that stream of data is recorded anonymously by Microsoft Application Insights. That data is then represented in a 3D column chart where the x axis is the date, the size of a block is the amount of time spent, and the color is the number of artwork touches (interactions). Clicking on a block shows detail about a the timeline of a visitor session on the rigth, wings entered, and artwork touched.

Visitors column chart
Column chart of gallery visitors

The fun of SandDance is that users can easily switch between 8 different chart types and see the same data in different ways. The same visitor data in a grid chart below.

Visitors grid chart
Grid chart of visitors to the gallery “2020-2022”

To get started with Galeryst analytics, sign in with your Adobe ID on Galeryst and you can see the Galleries, Artworks, and Content Labels data visualizations. If you are a paid subscriber at any level, you can see other charts with analytics for your galleries, your artwork and your visitors for all of your galleries or specific ones.

For users and subscribers, to see the Galeryst analytics and analytics for your galleries, go to the My Galleries page, and click on the menu button for any gallery and you should see a new Analytics in the user menu in the upper right:

user menu
Analytics option in user menu

Exploring Data

Exploring the data in Galeryst can be fun and insightful. If you explore the Content labels chart as shown below, you can see that artworks that have been label by AI as “colorful” got more interactions on average than many other types of content over the past week.

content labels chart
Content labels chart

The SandDance control is meant to be used for data exploration so you can easily change which parameters are shown on which axis, how color is used, what color scheme is used, and how the sizes of cubes are determined, to name a few parameters. We invite you to play with the data, experiment and find a visualization that’s insightful for you. It’s very easy for us to add another visualization so please reach out if you have created a useful one that you’d like to share. We are looking into adding capabilities to enable users to save chart options as well.

user experience for editing chart properties
The various data properties that can be used to drive the charts

Our goal in launching Galeryst was to enable any artist to create a beautiful gallery to share their artwork with the world. Now those artists can see what part of the world is appreciating their work. We invite you to create a gallery (anyone can create one for free), share it with the world, and explore the analytics that come from it. With the various subscription plans, you can create a gallery with an Adobe Photoshop Lightroom 7-day free trial, try out Galeryst for with a 1-month Artist plan, and see who comes to see your artwork!

Galeryst Analytics Walk-through

Customization Update 1/27/2023

Enabling saving user customized charts was easier to do than I thought. Now Galeryst user can save any chart configuration as a custom chart. Artists can modify any of the parameters (chart type, column mapping, color schemes, etc.) and press the save button next to the source selector to save a custom chart. If you modify the chart, press the save button again to save updates to it.

New Save button to create customized analytics charts