Google launches Pet Portraits, allowing you to find art doubles of your best furry friend

In 2018, Google launched the Art Selfie within its Arts & Culture app which saw 120 million people suddenly obsessed with art history as they uploaded selfies to look for their doppelgängers in the frames hanging around the most famous museums. Now, our best four legged friends don’t have to be left out.

Through a computer vision algorithm, the app finds your pet within an image and crops it, before a machine learning algorithm matches your pet’s likeness with tens of thousands of artworks which are currently in art institutions. After laughing at the image and showing everyone on social media, users can dig into the history of the artist and their artwork by tapping on the results.

The results can be mixed, though. It’s Nice That tried out the feature on its writers’ pets: whilst there were similarities, it seems one has to try a few times with the right angles and a pretty good quality image. Whilst the app did find some strikingly similar paintings of Stella the cat, Beans the dog won’t be so flattered to see her ceramic lookalike, whilst Martha the spaniel found one rather scraggly lookalike and one rather sleeker one from the Rijksmuseum. We think Crumpet’s, however, was rather spot on. The app also has a filter that lets you change your pictures to a painting in the style of a famous painter like Munch or Picasso. You can download Google Arts & Culture for Android and iOS.