cultural-heritage
Met Museum API
The Metropolitan Museum of Art's full collection records, with object metadata and open-access images. It offers a keyless public API, so collection data can be searched directly from this site without any account. Useful for art-historical research or for sourcing openly licensed images of museum objects. Probes currently rate it degraded, so responses may be inconsistent.
Why it’s useful & how it works
The Met's open collection is the destination when you need art-historical records or openly licensed high-resolution images of museum objects. Its public API is keyless, meaning Echo can query collection data directly without any account or sign-up. You search by keyword, filter by medium, culture, or date, and open-access works come with high-resolution downloads licensed under CC0. Note that response times may be inconsistent at present.
What’s inside
Over 492,000 works in the online collection, with more than 406,000 open-access images of public-domain artworks spanning 5,000 years of art from around the world.
API access
https://collectionapi.metmuseum.org/public/collection/v1/ (keyless)
What we measured
Our own probes, not the archive’s own claims. Re-run periodically; every reading below is dated.
Reachability
- Direct request
- Rate-limited HTTP 429 273 ms
- Through a datacenter proxy
- Rate-limited HTTP 429 1.3 s
- API, direct
- Responded HTTP 200 366 ms
- API, through a proxy
- Responded HTTP 200 532 ms
Did a real search return anything?
Returned results · 97 results for the sample query · median 879 ms · stable across runs
Benchmark coverage
Found 4 of 4 test items (100%) in the Cultural heritage cluster. Median response 281 ms.
By how well known the item is: 2/2 well-known, 2/2 mid .
Reachability measured 2026-08-22. Search checked 2026-08-22. Benchmark run 2026-08-22.
Access
Programmatic API access (a key may be required, see the API tag).