HQ Official Digital Artwork - Download & Discuss

[skibulk]

This thread is for sharing and discussing official MTG artwork released by WotC by any medium including their website and/or video game releases. There has already been some displaced discussion in other topics, but I think we should consolidate further discussion here for convenience.

Some Official artwork can only be obtained digitally (it has never been printed). For example, the MTGO 2012 Holiday Cube Draft featured exclusive artwork for several cards.

Artwork is available here: http://goo.gl/I5HxFj

[thefiremind]

Long ago I discovered this topic which basically talks about card pictures that can be found directly on the Wizards site with this convention:

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http://www.wizards.com/magic/images/cardart/<EXPANSION>/<CARD_NAME>_640.jpg

These are all 640px large.
I discovered that there are also a few which are 420px large:

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http://www.wizards.com/magic/images/cardart/<EXPANSION>/<CARD_NAME>_420.jpg

Only the pictures that were used in articles on the site can be found this way, and the convention has been used for a limited time (nowadays the links for pictures used in articles can't be guessed so easily).

Yesterday I coded a small program which automatically searched for all the pictures that used this convention, and you can find the results in the attachment. I might have missed some pictures whose card name contained special characters, but the chance is low.
Feel free to download the links and reupload the pictures in an archive.

[skibulk]

Thanks thefiremind! Link added. Does anybody else know of a good bulk source for official artwork? (As much as I'd like to collect images one-by-one, it's just not practical)

[skibulk]

Thanks to thefiremind, we now have DotP 2014's first DLC. I've extracted the images, renamed them, and added the download link to the opening post.

[thefiremind]

I just found a very interesting Tumblr blog...
http://theartofmtg.tumblr.com/
The amount of MTG HQ artwork you can find in it is amazing, and the owner seems willing to ask directly to the artists when there's a picture he really cannot find.
Maybe in the next days I'll try to make a program that extracts the image links from all the blog's pages, but I can't promise.

[skibulk]

I just found a very interesting Tumblr blog...
http://theartofmtg.tumblr.com/
The amount of MTG HQ artwork you can find in it is amazing, and the owner seems willing to ask directly to the artists when there's a picture he really cannot find.
Maybe in the next days I'll try to make a program that extracts the image links from all the blog's pages, but I can't promise.

Yah I asked theartofmtg if they had a download method, but no go. If you can rig something up then cool.

Tacebeam also has a pretty good collection on MTGS.

[thefiremind]

OK here's what I got from a run of my program. I only kept the links whose name ends with "1280", which contain the pictures with the highest quality, yet they are more than 2000. Some links will lead to useless pictures (fan art, photos, etc.) but there's no way to discern automatically. The links need to be downloaded and then the pictures need to be pruned manually. It's still faster than browsing all the blog's pages, if you pass the list to a batch downloader.

Just for reference, the latest post when I made the list was

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http://theartofmtg.tumblr.com/post/63245053971/vampire-week-10-06-10-12

Anything more recent isn't included.

[skibulk]

If I download and package thefiremind's link, will somebody name them?

[ChromeKaldra]

If I download and package thefiremind's link, will somebody name them?

I could name them. I really want hi-rez card arts.

[Huggybaby]

Excellent work! How may pics are there BTW?

[skibulk]

There are 2,065 images. Download the first 500 of them here, weighing in at 125mb! Go ahead and name them ChromeKaldra, then I'll get you some more if you're still up to it. I don't know how you're going to do it... Google's "search by image" feature might help you match the names to the artwork. Just drag an image onto the Google Images search page to use it.

@thefiremind
Are you sure that the "1280" extension is an indicator of quality? The images go as low as 500 x 350...

[ChromeKaldra]

Should we have the artist's name in the file name too or no?

[skibulk]

I wouldn't object - although that sounds like a lot of extra work for 2000 images. Doing so would be useful when the card names are the same (ie, you have multiple forsts).

[Huggybaby]

Can you separate them or name them by sets?

[ChromeKaldra]

I should be able to.