Filed away at the Metropolitan Museum of Art are documents with photographs showing the condition of the objects in the Met’s collection, and not just the Van Goghs and the Vermeers. The Met has tiny objects like a 3,000-year-old seal from a Mesopotamian cylinder that is 1⅛ inches tall and a miniature cotton tunic from South America.

Soon the Met will have a condition report on another object in its collection, an object that happens to be very large — more than 30 feet wide and more than 24 feet tall. But size is not the only reason the Met could not simply send this particular object to its in-house studio to be photographed, as it does with nearly everything else.

This particular object is outdoors.

So the Met did something it had never done for a condition report. It turned to a 21st century gadget — a drone.