How to Take Museum Selfies with Google Arts & Culture App in Canada [u]

Update Jan. 19: The museum selfie now works in Canada, no workaround needed.

The Google Arts & Culture iOS app has vaulted atop the Canadian App Store charts, currently sitting as the top free downloaded app in the country.

How did it get there? People want to try the new museum selfie match feature, but sadly it’s geo-restricted to the USA and won’t work in Canada and outside America.

But there’s a way around this—all you need a VPN service to change your IP to the USA, and you’ll be finding your art doppelgänger in no time. So get ready to take some museum selfies of yourself and your friends and have some laughs.

Step 1: Download the free Google Arts & Culture app from the App Store here.

Step 2: Sign up for a VPN (virtual private network) if you don’t have one already. We like ExpressVPN for its easy to use apps on iOS and Mac. The service includes a 30 day money-back guarantee if you’re not happy with it.

After installing and signing into the iOS app, click ‘Allow’ for the app to add to your VPN Configurations.

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Step 3: Select a VPN server in the USA, then tap the ‘on’ button. Once it’s green, it will let you know you’re connected.

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Step 4: Open the Google Arts & Culture iPhone app. Scroll down a bit until you see the section “Is your portrait in a museum?”. Tap it.

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Next, Google will warn your photo is sent to the company “to find artworks that look like you.” The company says they “won’t use any data from your photo for any other purpose and will only store your photo for the time it takes to search for matches.” Click ‘Accept’ to continue.

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Next, the camera will appear and you can take a picture from the iPhone’s front or rear camera. Here’s Steve Jobs as I prepare to find his museum artwork doppelgänger. The app works pretty well taking pictures of photos too, as you’ll soon find out:

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…and this was the top result, with Jobs resembling a ‘Portrait of Arthur Ransome’, by Dora Altounyan, with a 73% match:

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You can easily share the picture via the iOS share sheet, so you can send it to friends and family on iMessage or even AirDrop it to your Mac.

Also, once you disable your VPN, the feature will remain as long as you don’t force quit the Google Arts & Culture app (this was the case for us, anyways).

So there you have it. Let us know who you look like in the comments below!

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