Historical Photo Collections

That's cool.

One of my favorite collections of historical photos isn't on Flickr, but I love it so much I'll mention it anyway: The Empire That Was Russia, a collection of the COLOR photos taken across Russia 1900-1915 by Sergei Mikhailovich Prokudin-Gorskii. Beautiful and fascinating!

A huge amount of photos, published & unpublished, are on the Life Magazine website. I've used it to research Latin American armies in the 1940s.

Also a Google search on the keyword you want plus "source:life" will get you a lot more on a topic.

There's soooooo much good stuff on the Flickr Commons (the main page is here: http://www.flickr.com/commons/ , I'm not sure if that article links to it specifically). I'm not sure why that article picks those particular collections (if I were singling out institutions there's lots of others I'd pick, personally) but it's a great example of all the amazing stuff out there. Photos all the way back to the 1840s.

The LIFE magazine site is terrific, and even better is that you can search pretty much all the LIFE archives on Google-- as Dave Hardy says, by adding source:life or by going here: http://images.google.com/hosted/life . I've spent years of my life there, I think!

For wartime pictures, the Imperial War Museum is incredible: http://www.iwm.org.uk/collections/search . Tons of stuff, easy to browse and loads of information.

The Library of Congress has billions of pictures: http://www.loc.gov/pictures/ . Can't even be summed up! But definitely if you want civil war photos or 30s and WW2 US, it's the place to go.

Old photos are my passion-- I'm just about to start a master's in working with them, in fact! If anyone ever wants help looking for photos on specific topics, I'd be happy to help!

(Also, by the way... I have a blog where I share great old photos from these collections... ).

I have found an interesting blog. There are a lot of different pictures. Big part of it connected with history. You can check it out - www.themysteryworld.com/

First Wold War color photos. Amazing!

Not on Flickr, but I've been following an amazing collection of vintage photos on a site called Antique Photo Album. It's very good for when you need ideas of clothing worn in the 19th and early 20th centuries, as well as mourning customs (there are a lot of mourning photos - NOT for sensible souls!). I love looking at the faces of all those people from so long ago

Kindabild is another great photo collection from the county of Kinda, Sweden. It covers the years from 1880 to 1963. It's in Swedish but on the left side there is an option to put it in English, although I've never used it before (I understand Swedish) so I don't know how good the translation is.

I really enjoyed all your links, thanks

I just discovered the Denver Public Library's digital collections yesterday - haven't had time to browse through them too much yet, but it looks like there's a lot there. I believe a lot of it focuses on the American West, Colorado in particular: http://cdm16079.contentdm.oclc.org/cdm/

Also, this is a really neat historical photo blog: www.forgottenoldphotos.blogspot.com It's one of several run by bloggers who collect old photos and try to trace the identities of the people pictured, if there's any information on the photo, and return the pictures to their descendants. There are a number of other similar blogs linked in the sidebar.

Here is another place to take a look around, not just photos, but also lots newspaper and magazines

http://trove.nla.gov.au

The Prokudin-Gorskii pictures are stunning, the more so when you realize that he had to take each picture three times using different colored plates and then compile the image--or so I remember from what I read.

Thanks, all, for sharing.

I follow the Kansas Historical Society on Facebook and at least once a week it seems like they are posting a photo from their collection. I was struggling with some writer's block, saw one of their photos. Inspired by it I went on to write (and place) in a writing contest.

So look and see if your state historical society has any kind of social media/online presence and if they post photos on a regular basis.

And thanks for the Denver link, I love looking at Old West photos

Ooh, I didn't know the Kansas Historical Society was on Facebook! Nice. This is a great resource for my current WIP--and I also love it because my grandmother's family is from Kansas (Lawrence).

What an awesome thread! *bookmarks thread* Thank you mayqueen! The quality of the photos are amazing.

Lately I've been finding lots of interesting nineteenth-century material in the Mary Evans Picture library, a commercial database of stock images for publishers. It focuses on images from old books which have fallen out of copyright. Be forewarned that the dates on their images are often quite unhelpful. Something labelled "1st Century AD" usually turns out to be a nineteenth-century re-drawing of a fifteenth-century manuscript illumination of a biblical scene. Nevertheless, I've found pictures in there that I haven't seen anywhere else. The dates on nineteenth-century depictions of contemporary subjects are a little better.

angeliz2k said:

Ooh, I didn't know the Kansas Historical Society was on Facebook! Nice. This is a great resource for my current WIP--and I also love it because my grandmother's family is from Kansas (Lawrence).

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glad to help