It's been a while since I shared here a sample of the content I've been adding to the Floyd R. Whitmore Public Domain Photo Archive. The vast majority of the original material is in the form of color 35mm slides. However, in the 10th box I found two sets of prints, one in color and one in black & white. After finishing the slides, I tackled the B&W prints, most of which are large (8x10-ish). The color prints are in bad shape (torn, stained, etc.), so I decided to do that set last.

Scanning prints is much more labor-intensive and slow. I can set up 4 slides at a time and then let the scanner do its thing. With these prints, I have to handle them one at a time. There's a lot more physical material to handle, and a lot more dust to deal with. Many of the prints have information written on the back, which is both good and bad. It's good to have names and other documentation, but it's bad in that adding metadata to the scanned images will be substantially slower than what I've been able to manage with the slides.

I'm not sure how many B&W prints there are, but I'm guessing in the 150-200 range. They were stored in a photo paper box (which I originally thought might be just unused -- and expired -- photo paper), I'm roughly halfway through, and I have 80 scans already. I'm pretty sure there are some duplicates in this set -- duplicates within it, and duplicates of color slide images. Eventually I hope to identify duplicates and remove them. I'm pretty sure there are duplicates within the slides too. Right now the focus is on sharing as much raw content with the public as possible. I'll shift from quantity to quality once everything is scanned. (This will include de-duplication, adding metadata, categorizing/grouping, rescanning in some cases, keywording, etc.)

I had thought to work on these prints over several days, scanning ~40-50 a day, to not sink too much time at once into this unpaid project. I changed my mind today after a "not so great" start to the day. I'm spending the evening scanning, listening to Electrobox on C89.5 (a nonprofit/educational radio station that always appreciates donations, lol), and having some beer. It's Friday, I get to relax, right? Relaxation by being productive a different way, yeah, that's my idea of partying these days.

If you have some free time, stop by the archive and browse a bit. It's free!

#public-domain #publicdomain #cc0 #history #historical-photos #photography