Since being founded in 1946, the photo agency takes shots for national museums while promoting and distributing the photo archives of national collections. Due to its policy of international partnerships, it also distributes the collections of prestigious institutions abroad, such as the British Museum, the Gemäldegalerie, the Metropolitan Museum of Art, the Museo del Prado, the Los Angeles County Art Museum and many more. It now manages a catalogue of nearly 1.5 million digitised images, from prehistory to the present, and is the second biggest art imagery agency in the world.

80,000 NEW IMAGES IN 2021 The photo agency s total revenue in 2021 was 2.925 million, slightly up on 2020. However, this revenue was affected by the public health crisis just as in the previous year. Despite health restrictions, the agency continued its work to digitise national collections. As such, in 2021, 549 shooting days took place across all museums and, with the additions from foreign collections, nearly 80,000 images were indexed and captioned by the documentation department and added to the agency s database. Committed to offering very high-quality images, the agency uses cutting-edge equipment, including 150-million-pixel digital backs, and for many years has been investing in 3D technology, becoming a leader in the field.

SOLID EXPERTISE IN 3D IMAGES The agency continued to run the France Collections 3D project, first launched in 2015 as part of a call to tender from the Fonds pour la Société Numérique, and to date has amassed nearly 2,000 models in high definition. The digitisation process involves two technologies, structured light scanners or the photogrammetry process developed by the agency. During 2021, the agency conducted 25 days of 3D scanning. Digitisations included the Venus de Milo, Sleeping Hermaphrodite, the Monzon Lion for the town hall of Monzón de Campos in Spain, the transverse cross section of the Opéra Garnier for a multimedia app developed by the Musée d'Orsay, and a large number of works linked to Napoleon I to mark the bicentenary of his death (Austerlitz sword, cocked hat, busts, etc.).

IMAGES D ART AND PHOTO.RMN.FR: TWO WEBSITES THAT CONTINUE TO GROW Launched in October 2015, the Images d Art website for the general public received 800,000 visitors in 2021. It also allows the agency to focus on new educational, scientific and commercial distribution channels for images through its technical interface (API). Overall, the Images d art agency and photo.rmn websites exceeded 1.7 million sessions and over 10 million pages viewed.

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