Shorpy Historic Picture Archive | Hacker News Reader

Shorpy Historic Picture Archive

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33 pointsrhapsodic14 comments

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.

> the blog-like, search-unfriendly interface

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.

  > Still dubious, though many are transformations of LoC images
  > which the blog owner claims copyright on.

Specifically, http://www.loc.gov/pictures/ — hundreds of thousands of catalogued, searchable images.

> 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.

This is a site which takes images in the public domain, adds a watermark and charges for reprints.

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.

True. Ever tried to search the National Archives online? It ain't no fun at all. Shorpy's search function is merely poor, so I tend to use it.

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.

The first electric car?

http://www.junipergallery.com/node/139

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Pope-Waverley

It's easily 10 years too late for that.

70 years too late http://www.electricauto.org/?page=evhistory

Search for "Detroit Publishing Company", for mammoth negative sizes a century ago, with astonishing detail. Amazing, better than HD resolution.

Note that these and many other gems Shorpy copied from the National Archives, and they are online there too.

Ads..sigh

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