V&A Collection Screensaver
The V&A Collection screensaver shows a rotating gallery from the Victoria and Albert Museum's 741,000-object catalogue, read live in your browser, key-less. It's free, runs in your browser, and ESC exits.
Live preview
Press ESC to leave fullscreen. Settings are saved in your browser only.
How the V&A Collection screensaver works
The saver reads the source described above and draws it on a canvas — no account, no tracking.
A rotating gallery from the Victoria and Albert Museum's 741,000-object catalogue, read live in your browser, key-less. The search term rotates by necessity: the V&A's query-less search returns objects with no titles at all, grouped by whichever maker sorts first.
It refreshes on a schedule, so what you see stays current.
Colours and any options can be changed in settings; nothing is stored beyond your own browser.
Browsing a museum catalogue by search term
The Victoria and Albert Museum in London collects art, design and performance objects, from ceramics and textiles to fashion, furniture, photography and theatre material. Its online collection is open to developers through a public search API, and this saver uses it to show a rotating gallery.
Searches take a query term (the API’s q parameter searches all fields of every object record), so the saver supplies a subject and cycles through a list of terms. Each result carries fields such as object type, title, place, maker and date, plus an image identifier. That identifier is turned into a picture through the museum’s IIIF image service, which can return images at a requested size.
Catalogue records are of uneven depth: some objects have long scholarly descriptions and several photographs, while others have a short entry or no image at all. Records also carry a current-location field, so a catalogue entry is not necessarily an object on gallery display. Dates are often approximate, and attributions can be revised as research continues. What you see is a sample from a particular search term, not a representative survey of the museum.
A worked example
A rotating gallery from the Victoria and Albert Museum's 741,000-object catalogue, read live in your browser, key-less. The search term rotates by necessity: the V&A's query-less search returns objects with no titles at all, grouped by whichever maker sorts first.
Settings & tips
- Accent and Background recolour the display.
- Every value on screen comes from the live source — nothing is simulated.
- Press ESC to leave fullscreen.
Frequently asked questions
- Is this real data?
- Yes — it comes from the source named on this page and is refreshed on a schedule.
- Is a key needed?
- No. This source is fully key-less.
- Is it free?
- Yes — free, no download, in your browser.
- Is every object shown on display at the museum?
- Not necessarily. The saver shows catalogue entries, and each record has its own current-location field, so an object may be in a gallery or held elsewhere.
- Why do the pictures follow a theme for a while?
- The saver rotates through search terms, and the images are the results returned for the current term.