So: you’ve downloaded Aura (and if you haven’t yet…get on it). What’s next? Aura is a mobile app that helps you remember artwork you see. Art is everywhere — in a museum, cafe, home, and on the street. Using Aura is easy: take a photo of the art first and then take a photo of the wall label last— then press done! Aura will then create an art memory in your own personal notebook.
Aura is easy to use, but there are a lot of tricks to make your Aura even better.
Taking Multiple Photos of a single work: You can take multiple images of an artwork and still have it be filed with one memory. Simply take as many photos as you like of the artwork, remember to get the label last, and then hit done! This feature is great for capturing detail of paintings, different angles on sculptures and different perspectives within immersive installation works.
Taking photos of other text: Aura assumes that the last image you take when creating a memory is of the wall label, so it will try and translate that image into searchable text. If there is more than one photo you want translated into text (if the wall label is large, or you want to copy extra text to that memory), simply take photos of all the text you want saved. Consider even taking photos of handouts from galleries such as price lists if you want the text saved in your art notebook.
Then, once you’ve finished your memory, swipe through the images at the top of the memory detail screen until you find the image you want read and use the action button to recognize text.
Making your own notes: Part of what makes Aura so unique is our note taking ability. You already know that Aura can read wall labels and change it into text — but did you know you can add your own personal notes? And this feature can be used to group and later find related memories.
You can write in your personal thoughts, facts that you learned while on a docent tour, or write in keywords to create your own group of artworks. For example, I add in “Essay” for artworks I know I’ll be citing in upcoming papers.
Other users who are art pros add names of clients or exhibits they are working on. Someone exploring a theme such as specific subject matter, like one of our team who is interested in depictions of Ophelia, may add that as a note to every relevant work.
One user typed in “want” for all the art pieces she wanted to buy at an art fair.
There is an infinite number of personalized groups you can make, all by creating keywords in your note section.
While Aura does read wall labels, it sometimes gets some of the text wrong — automated text recognition is a useful but imperfect technology. That may not matter — semi-correct text may still be helpful to glance at or search.
But if you have a memory you want to be sure is clean for sharing with others or precise search, you can tap on the notes Aura has read and edit them. You can delete extra characters, type new text, or hit return to separate a single note onto two notes, much like separating paragraphs when you type a document. You can also delete from the beginning of a note to merge that note with the previous note if Aura made a break where you don’t want one.
It is especially important to do this with artist and other names of well known people — once Aura recognizes a person’s name it will link to more information — but it only does this if the full artist name is a single note without any extra detail. Use RETURN to break off any dates or other text following the artist’s name onto a new line.
Once you’ve finished and cleaned up your memory’s notes, you can set a tag for each note from the list of available options like “artist”, “title” etc..
If you want to customize the tag, you can, just tap a second time in the tag area and you will get your keyboard to type any tag you want to use.
Deleting a lot of garbage at once: If Aura made a real hash of text recognition — which it may do once in a while — you can quickly delete *all* of the text in a memory by shaking the phone. Then you can start over by manually typing notes or trying to re-recognize text in a specific image.
Navigating Aura: Now that you have a group of memories, what’s the best way to navigate through them? When looking at a memory’s detail screen you can swipe between images to view all the pictures you took. You can also tap on an image to make it full screen. You can swipe between memories by swiping in the text area.
And at the bottom of the detail screen, you can tap on “forget” to forget that memory.
When on the home screen you can use your fingers to pinch in or out to adjust your level of zoom.
Sharing: It’s easy to share your art memories using Facebook, Twitter, SMS, or email. Select the art memory you’d like to share and swipe till you see the image you want to post. Tap on the action button in the top right to pick a specific app or action.
Sharing with Aura is better than just sharing photographs — with Aura your friends, family and followers will be able to follow the aura.com link to see all the photos you took of the artwork and all your notes. Here is an example of what a shared link looks like.
Maps: Want to see where you were taking photos? You can tap on the name of your location and open up a map of where your memories were made.
Need more help or have any suggestions? Email us at help@aura.com
