Infinite Image is a way to wander through museums' public-domain collections by color, starting with The Metropolitan Museum of Art. Every artwork is cut into a grid. Click a square, and the next work shares that square's color.
A color ribbon: the colors followed from one work to the next, blending band to band.
How to play
Daily Color Golf
Each day, everyone starts on the same work and looks for the same target color.
Every click is a stroke. Going back along your path is free.
Click a square within ΔE 15 of the target to win. ΔE measures how different two colors look; below about 10, they read as a close match.
Give up to see which artwork the color came from.
A new puzzle starts at midnight, your time. Your progress and streak stay in this browser.
Free play
Start on a random work and press Shuffle to jump somewhere new.
The Path shows every work you've visited. Go back and click a different square to start a new branch; nothing you explored is lost.
Sharing
Make a color ribbon turns your path into an image to save or post.
In free play, share a link: whoever opens it watches your path replay, then continues it, and can pass it on again.
In the daily puzzle, share your score and a link to the same puzzle. The image shows only colors, so it won't spoil the route.
How it works
Every work is analyzed ahead of time. Each of its 36 squares gets its most common color: the pixels are sorted into groups of similar color, measured in the CIELAB color space, where distances match what people see, and the fullest group is averaged.
Each work also gets a palette of up to five colors, with how much of the image each covers. For objects photographed on a plain backdrop, like vases and sculpture, the backdrop is left out.
When you click a square, the page compares its color with every work's palette, right in your browser, and favors works where that color covers more of the image. The museum is only asked for images to display.
Matches are sampled at random from across the whole collection, so the walk rarely repeats. In the daily puzzle, that randomness comes from a seed, so the same square leads everyone to the same work.
What ΔE means
ΔE (“delta E”) is a number for how different two colors look. Each color is placed in CIELAB by its lightness, its place from green to red and its place from blue to yellow, and ΔE is the straight-line distance between the two.
0–2
Hard to tell apart, even side by side.
Under 10
A close match.
15
Close enough to win the daily puzzle.
50+
Different colors altogether.
The collection
Every artwork, image and fact here comes from The Met's Open Access program, through its collection API. Open Access images and data are released under CC0, and only works The Met marks as public domain are included. Each wall label links to the work on metmuseum.org.
Infinite Image is an independent project. It isn't affiliated with or endorsed by The Metropolitan Museum of Art.
Privacy
No accounts or cookies.
Visits, and a few moments in the game (a daily puzzle solved or given up, a ribbon made, a path shared or opened), are counted with Plausible, which collects no personal data and sets no cookies.
Daily progress and your streak are stored only in your browser.
Your browser loads the collection and puzzle data from this site, images from images.metmuseum.org, typefaces from Google Fonts and the analytics script from plausible.io.
Share links contain only artwork numbers and colors.
Credits
Made by Dave Kim. Set in Spectral, Libre Franklin and IBM Plex Mono.