Flickr Takes Historical Imagery To The Masses
Duncan Riley
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A new project from Flickr will see the photo sharing site showcasing historical imagery from public resources.
“The Commons” is a pilot project between Flickr and the Library of Congress that will tap into the Library’s rich historical footage and allow it to be viewed from Flickr. The first two sets in the pilot are American Memory: Color photographs from the Great Depression, color photographs of the Farm Security Administration-Office of War Information Collection include scenes of rural and small-town life, migrant labor, and the effects of the Great Depression and The George Grantham Bain Collection, “Photos produced and gathered by George Grantham Bain for his news photo service, including portraits and worldwide news events, but with special emphasis on life in New York City.
Flickr said that as well as bringing these historical photographs to the masses, the project will also “facilitate the collection of general knowledge about these collections, with the hope that this information can feed back into the catalogues, making them richer and easier to search,” in other words, they want to tap into Flickr users to tag these images.
The Library of Congress has more here.
I just love old pictures of well known places. Does anybody nkow of any other projects or groups such as this on Flickr?
I forgot
Too bad they resized eeverything to 1024 x 748..
These could have been fantastic prints for my place..
My google E-mail has not been up all day yesterday and none oday. HELP
Good project. Everybody benefits from it.
Hey Olivier, follow the links in the description “persistent url” back to the Library’s web site where the high-res versions are available.
I LOVE this… so much history buried away in drawers all over the world.
Interesting for about 5 minutes
I love looking at historic photographs. It is quite interesting to me to study how things looked in the past. Everyone can benefit from this project.
http://www.webepags.com
These are not only great historical artifacts but the quality of the photography is very high.
Nice move on Flickr’s part . . .
This is an interesting effort and I hope points towards future, similar efforts to leverage the power of a web full of hobbyists matched with publicly archived data of all sorts. This could add real value to our shared historical knowledge. In short: pretty damn cool.
i love this. I have seen more photo from flickr today than all the time combined before today.
They should just partner with Shorpy.
http://www.shorpy.com/
Just an additional note: all of these images are also available on the Web site of the Library’s Prints and Photographs Division, along with around a million more. Specifically, here are the color Depression-era photos, and here are the Bain Collection images.
thanks for mentioning this. appreciate it.
Hello Oliver,
Philadelphia has actually a similar project (not on Flickr though). It’s called PhillyHistory (www.phillyhistory.org). It is a online database of the Philadelphia City Archives (estimated 2 million photos; 50,000+ photos on line as of today). The photos can be searched by keywords, dates, etc. but most importantly by location. A GIS company built the software so all photos on the site have been gecoded. You can enter a precise address or just an intersection. You can buy the photos as well (you were mentioning your place). Can add to favorites, send to friends by email, etc. Pretty neat.