For all the record-keepers and those interested in century-old (or more) pictures, there is an exciting opportunity, as nearly 14 million old photos from 600 million book pages, would soon hit Flickr!
Internet Archive, a non-profit organisation, is scanning 600 million old book pages and uploading the pictures, to make it accessible to users for free reference and download.
As of now 2.6 million photos have been uploaded from the total of 14 million images and some of these are posted on Flickr, the photo-sharing site.
It is the first batch of the photos, which Internet Archive terms as “the commons.” The data from these scanned pages make up a humongous 19 petabytes.
Together with the images there are links to the books and the pages, name of the author, publisher and in certain case, the subject. There are also descriptions of the books in some instances. In many cases, the texts around the picture have also been listed and this feature will enable keyword searches, for easy access to the specific images.
For example if any user types in love, the search would display old images of cherubs or even pictures of courtship. In the same way Mortis or death would throw up images of the subject from the bygone era.
It is not clear how long the organisation would take to upload the rest of the images, but Internet Archive said that it is working hard and would try to upload the rest of the images over the next few months.
