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Internet Archive Uploads Millions of Historical Images to Flickr

And yet, the Internet Archive isn't even halfway done with all the images it has to upload.

August 30, 2014

If you have a hankering for some old-timey cat pictures, the Internet Archive has you covered. Specifically, the Internet Archive's Flickr account will likely contain that which you seek, as the organization recently posted several million images to the popular photo-sharing site.

These images are the first batch of what the Internet Archive is calling "The Commons," a new collection made up photographs from the more than 600 million book pages that the organization has digitally scanned. The pages themselves amount to more than 19 petabytes of data—with more than 14 million images eventually expected to make their way online.

"What would it look like if those 600 million pages could be 'read' completely differently? What if every illustration, drawing, chart, map, or photograph became an entry point, allowing one to navigate the world's books not as paragraphs of text, but as a visual tapestry of our lives? How would we learn and explore knowledge differently? Those were the questions that launched a project to catalog the imagery of half a millennium of books," reads the Internet Archive's description.

What we like most about the Internet Archive's ambitious project is the sheer level of detail that it assigns to each scanned image. Within its Flickr descriptions, the Internet Archive lists the title of the book that the image came from and the year of its publication, as well as its author, publisher, and subject (where applicable).

Those looking at a particular image will also receive hyperlinks to the specific page on which it appeared—viewable via the Internet Archive's website—as well as a link to the description of the book itself and any other images that the Internet Archive scanned from that title.

Where possible, the Internet Archive also lists any text that appears around the picture itself.

"The latter is especially powerful, as it allows to keyword search 500 years of images, instantly accessing particular topics or themes. Searching for love yields a myriad images of cherubs and courtship, while mortis (death) offers a glimpse into the early modern period's fascination with the subject. A search forbird offers a vividly colorful showcase of the world's bird species, while searching for telephone traces the invention's history from its introduction as an electric novelty to its widespread adoption," reads the Internet Archive's blog post.

While we don't know the speed at which the Internet Archive will be uploading the rest of its millions of pictures, the organization notes that it'll be working hard over the next few months to get all of its scanned images online.

"I think one of the greatest things people will do is time travel through the images," said Kalev Leetaru, originator of the scanning project, in an interview with the BBC.

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About David Murphy

David Murphy
David Murphy got his first real taste of technology journalism when he arrived at PC Magazine as an intern in 2005. A three-month gig turned to six months, six months turned to occasional freelance assignments, and he later rejoined his tech-loving, mostly New York-based friends as one of PCMag.com's news contributors. For more tech tidbits from David Murphy, follow him on Facebook or Twitter (@thedavidmurphy).

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