If you are like most people, you are likely to have at least a couple of thousand old prints boxed up and stored in an attic or dark closet. That number is high enough to deter most people from getting their old photo scanning project off the ground. Even if they know that they don’t have to tackle it by themselves; that it’s possible – and even advisable – to rope in a reliable professional scanning service to help with the tedious parts.
But if, like the New York Times, you have something like six million old photos in your archives, then it calls for industrial grade scanning support and strategies to see you through it.
The old photos were stored in the Times morgue, a giant underground repository of old newspaper clippings, images and books. As the digitizing project got underway, a ten person team worked steadily to get photos out of physical drawers and folders, feed them through heavy duty scanners and then, with some help from Google, catalog and archive them digitally.
Why was this effort so important to the Times? Like other legacy publishers, the Times decided to take the plunge and digitize its massive image collection when it realized how valuable these photos were as windows into the past.
“We have covered the world for such a long time we just have this vast store of information. The immediate goal is to take advantage of all this material and information we’ve gathered for so long and bring it back to life.
One way the Times is doing this is through an archival storytelling project called Past Tense. Since it was started last year, the Past Tense team has already begun plumbing the Times photo archive for interesting feature stories. These have included recreating photos of iconic New York sites first taken in 1951; an exploration of dance photography, a look at the City during rainy days from the past, and a lot more.
Many of these photos and the stories behind are now part of the NYT’s archival Instagram page, to give us a dose of both history and nostalgia. Here are a few of our favorites….
Scenes of Summer: Road trip ready; A resourceful kid in the city; Coney Island fun ride
If you are inspired by what the New York Times is doing with its photo archive, take a moment to see how you can rescue your own valuable old photos from oblivion. They may not be in a morgue, but shoeboxes and dark basements can have the same effect of keeping them trapped and away from the light of day. It’s time to get them out of the boxes and digitize them so that it’s easier to share these nuggets of photo nostalgia with others. The New York Times has shown us that it’s possible to scale even the tallest of digitizing mountains – with a little bit of help.