As I have a long term project to do something similar for a large collection of antique postcards I was interested to take a look. Unfortunately the blog-like, search-unfriendly interface combined with the dubious unstated origin and licensing of the images didn't really impress.
> combined with the dubious unstated origin and licensing of the images
It's stated in the sidebar on every page. Still dubious, though many are transformations of LoC images which the blog owner claims copyright on.
It's a cool archive, but no, it's not for use/reuse. Browse it for fun but understand it's a commercial enterprise designed to profit off public domain works.
> commercial enterprise designed to profit off public domain works
As it goes, this seems fairly benign to me...
* The original photos are readily available. A link directly to each photo might be a bit more "commons-friendly", but you can find most of the images by searching for the title on the Library of Congress page, which is linked on every image.
* There's at least a bit of work, both in curating the collection and retouching the individual photos. I tried to cheap out by cleaning up one of the originals and printing it myself. It's more difficult and time-consuming than you might think.
It's unclear to me what the status of a retouched public domain photo is. I could imagine that they are derivative works, particularly if that retouching has some sort of creative component (e.g., patching gaps or painting over creases) vs. something entirely automatic.
* Even if they gave away the high-res retouched files, I suspect most of the value comes from having them printed and attractively framed. Clearly this isn't a service that will be given away for free.
> As I have a long term project to do something similar for a large collection of antique postcards I was interested to take a look.
You may already know about it already, but you can also draw inspiration from this project: http://www.oldsf.org/# . I know I did for my small-ish collection of old postcards.
I'm happy to see a link on the top of Hacker News that is grey (visited) for maybe the first time ever. I've been frequenting Shorpy for many years. The view on the past it gives is always interesting and often stunning.
It used to be better TBH -- you had access to all of the images high resolution versions (enough for print quality); now it seems you don't.
Seems their 'angle' is that the process often useless images into nice ones -- it's true, it's not easy to do something with bad quality scan, but I agree with the other posts that it's now way too overloaded with ads.
Still, they found, treated and published some marvelous images, so they do get some credit for that.
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[ 3.5 ms ] story [ 43.7 ms ] threadhttp://www.junipergallery.com/node/139
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Pope-Waverley
It's blog-like because it's just a blog.
> combined with the dubious unstated origin and licensing of the images
It's stated in the sidebar on every page. Still dubious, though many are transformations of LoC images which the blog owner claims copyright on.
It's a cool archive, but no, it's not for use/reuse. Browse it for fun but understand it's a commercial enterprise designed to profit off public domain works.
As it goes, this seems fairly benign to me...
* The original photos are readily available. A link directly to each photo might be a bit more "commons-friendly", but you can find most of the images by searching for the title on the Library of Congress page, which is linked on every image.
* There's at least a bit of work, both in curating the collection and retouching the individual photos. I tried to cheap out by cleaning up one of the originals and printing it myself. It's more difficult and time-consuming than you might think.
It's unclear to me what the status of a retouched public domain photo is. I could imagine that they are derivative works, particularly if that retouching has some sort of creative component (e.g., patching gaps or painting over creases) vs. something entirely automatic.
* Even if they gave away the high-res retouched files, I suspect most of the value comes from having them printed and attractively framed. Clearly this isn't a service that will be given away for free.
You may already know about it already, but you can also draw inspiration from this project: http://www.oldsf.org/# . I know I did for my small-ish collection of old postcards.
It would make sense to start thinking about an online foto gallery of historical interest.
We have the storage capacity now, and those old fotos will rapidly disappear if left in closets and attics.
Seems their 'angle' is that the process often useless images into nice ones -- it's true, it's not easy to do something with bad quality scan, but I agree with the other posts that it's now way too overloaded with ads.
Still, they found, treated and published some marvelous images, so they do get some credit for that.
Note that these and many other gems Shorpy copied from the National Archives, and they are online there too.