Artbay Gallery owner Pauline Bianchi is always looking at ways to overcome obstacles for her customers.
Thinking about why people might not buy an artwork, she tried to solve a problem many have tried to solve - visualising it on a wall.
The Artbay Gallery app, believed to be a world first in art viewing and buying, has now been launched.
It allows art lovers to upload a photograph of the room they wanted to adorn, browse the artworks available at Ms Bianchi's Queenstown gallery and superimpose
images of artworks on to the image of their room to see how they look. Artworks can then be bought through Artbay's secure online store.
The app, which has been a year in the making, was available for iPhone and iPad in a development that Ms Bianchi described as ''super exciting''.
''There are very few purchases you make you intend to keep for a lifetime but art is one of them. To be able to offer a service like this, we really feel good about being able to help people make the right decisions,'' she said.
Since her gallery was established 10 years ago, she had always tried to keep up with technology, whether it was doing e-catalogues or online videos.
There were valid reasons why potential customers did not buy an artwork ''on the spot'' such as whether it would look good on their wall, or whether the artwork was too large or small.
With all the apps in the market, she thought it must be possible to do something to help people overcome those obstacles, Ms Bianchi said.
After researching the subject on the internet, she came across an app developer in the United States. Coincidentally, the wife of one of the company's owners was in New Zealand shortly afterwards and visited Artbay Gallery.
She had a background in galleries and said the company had the same thoughts as Ms Bianchi and had already started developing an app.
Ms Bianchi worked alongside the New York-based company for about six months, providing feedback, going through the trialling process and making improvements.
Some features were exclusive to Artbay Gallery, while the American company was about to release the app on the market in the US.
It was working ''absolutely seamlessly'' and the response from the public had been excellent, she said.
Technology made the world a ''small place'' and, with the development of apps, ''virtually anything is possible''. People were also becoming much more tech-savvy, she said.
The app scaled artworks to size them correctly in the space. Tools could also be used to change the colour of a wall, or the lighting, or put a frame on an artwork.
About half of the gallery's art was sent overseas, with many paintings destined for Australia.
