Met Museum Collection Scraper — Art, Artists & Images

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Extract structured artwork data from the Metropolitan Museum of Art Collection API — the Met's official open-access API covering 500,000+ objects spanning 5,000 years of human creativity. This Actor lets you search and browse the Met's collection programmatically, returning artist details, artwork metadata, culture, classification, and high-resolution image URLs in clean JSON format.

The Metropolitan Museum of Art's open-access initiative makes over 490,000 public-domain works freely available with zero authentication. Whether you're building an art history dataset, populating a RAG pipeline with cultural knowledge, or researching by department, this Actor gives you structured, ready-to-use data.

Key Features

• Keyword search — Search the full Met collection by any term (e.g., "impressionism", "ancient egypt", "samurai armor")
• Department filtering — Narrow results to specific museum departments (European Paintings, Asian Art, Modern Art, and 17 more)
• No authentication required — The Met's public API requires no API key or credentials
• Concurrency-optimized fetching — Fetches 5 object details in parallel for fast throughput
• Public domain flag — Each record includes isPublicDomain to identify freely reusable images
• Image URLs included — Primary high-resolution and small image URLs for every object that has them
• Graceful error handling — Skips unavailable objects without failing the run
• Configurable result count — Return 1 to 1,000 records per run

Output Data Fields

How to Scrape Met Museum Data

Follow these steps to extract Metropolitan Museum of Art collection data using this Actor:

1. Navigate to the Met Museum Collection Scraper Actor page on the Apify Store.
2. Click Try for free or Start to open the input form.
3. (Optional) Enter a Search Query to find specific artworks — try "van gogh", "ancient greek vase", or "impressionist landscape".
4. (Optional) Enter a Department ID to restrict results to one department. For example, enter 11 for European Paintings or 6 for Asian Art.
5. Set Max Results to control how many records are returned (default: 50, max: 1,000).
6. Leave all fields blank to browse the full collection (returns the first maxResults objects by ID).
7. Click Start to launch the Actor. Most runs complete in under 2 minutes.
8. Once the run finishes, open the Dataset tab to view results.
9. Download your data as JSON, CSV, or Excel using the export buttons.

Department ID Reference

Input Example

{
"q":"sunflowers",
"departmentId":"",
"maxResults":25
}

To scrape by department with no keyword filter:

{
"q":"",
"departmentId":"11",
"maxResults":100
}

To browse the full collection (first 50 objects):

{}

Output Example

{
"objectID":436535,
"title":"Wheat Field with Cypresses",
"artist":"Vincent van Gogh",
"artistNationality":"Dutch",
"objectDate":"1889",
"medium":"Oil on canvas",
"department":"European Paintings",
"classification":"Paintings",
"culture":"",
"isPublicDomain":true,
"primaryImage":"https://images.metmuseum.org/CRDImages/ep/original/DT1567.jpg",
"objectURL":"https://www.metmuseum.org/art/collection/search/436535",
"accessionYear":"1993",
"creditLine":"Purchase, The Annenberg Foundation Gift, 1993"
}

Pricing

This Actor fetches data from the Metropolitan Museum of Art's free public API. Each run makes one search/list call plus one detail call per object.

• Per result: $0.003/result
• Actor start: Default platform rate
• Typical run (50 results): ~$0.15 in Actor fees + minimal Apify compute costs
• Typical run time: Under 60 seconds for 50 results; under 5 minutes for 500 results

Use Cases

• Art history research — Build datasets for academic analysis of styles, periods, or cultures
• Education platforms — Power art education apps with rich metadata and public-domain images
• RAG pipeline content — Feed artwork descriptions and provenance into LLM knowledge bases
• Museum data aggregation — Combine with other museum APIs for cross-collection research
• Image dataset creation — Collect public-domain images for computer vision training
• Cultural analytics — Analyze distribution of cultures, periods, and mediums across the collection

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FAQ

Is it legal to use the Metropolitan Museum of Art API?

Yes. The Met provides this API as a free public service under their Open Access policy. Over 490,000 public-domain works are available for any use. No terms of service are violated by programmatic access to this official API.

Do I need an API key to use the Met Museum API?

No. The Metropolitan Museum of Art's collection API requires no authentication, API key, or account. This Actor accesses it directly without any credentials.

What is the isPublicDomain field?

When isPublicDomain is true, the Met has determined the artwork (and its images) are in the public domain and may be freely reproduced, modified, and distributed for any purpose including commercial use.

Can I export Met Museum data to Excel or CSV?

Yes. Apify supports exporting your results as JSON, CSV, Excel, XML, and other formats from the Dataset tab after a run completes.

Why are some primaryImage fields empty?

Not all Met objects have digitized images available. Objects that are not photographed, or whose images are rights-restricted, will have empty primaryImage fields.

How current is the data?

The Met Museum API reflects the live collection database. New acquisitions and updates appear in real time. Schedule this Actor to run periodically to keep your dataset current.

Legal Disclaimer

This Actor accesses publicly available data from the Metropolitan Museum of Art's official open-access collection API (collectionapi.metmuseum.org). No authentication bypass, scraping of protected content, or violation of terms of service is involved. The Met explicitly encourages programmatic access to this API for research and educational purposes. Users are responsible for ensuring their downstream use of the extracted data complies with applicable laws and the Met's open access policy. For support, contact the Actor developer through the Apify Store.