No reports here for a while, but still plenty of progress. In the five months since our last report, we have added 5,326 photographer records and 637 digital images — so we are averaging over 1,000 photographer records and more than 100 new images each month. Last month (June) we exceeded both averages with 1350 new photographer records and 346 images. Considering everything else accomplished in June, that is quite an accomplishment.
The big news is that I have decided to remove the artists database from this site, and replace it with information on dating old photographs. Yes, the artist database is useful, but to an entirely different audience than everything else on the site — so eventually it will become its own site, or I’ll sell the database to someone else. ClassyArts will concentrate on historic photography.
To that end, I’ve written 60% of a new section on dating old photographs, and hope to put it up soon. I have also begun a new database: dated imprints. That database will include the photographer’s imprints (from the case, or front or back of card) for dated images. For card photographs, certain imprint styles suggest a particular date range — but for any particular photographer, the years they actually used a particular imprint is likely to be much narrower. Hence having a dated example of imprints from that photographer can help date other photographs with identical or even similar imprints. In June the dated imprints database reached 385 records. It has not been placed online yet, but will be soon. Most of the 385 images entered so far are from before 1880, when I get up to the year 1900 I’ll put the database online. The photographer names, years and cities will be listed in a public area, while the exact address and image of the imprint will be available to paid subscribers.
One other fun development was added (and written) today — so it is July news but might as well be included here — I wrote a simple program to make a game guessing the date for images. The images are from our public-domain photograph collection, so they are rather small thumbnail images, the originals are not online, but that just adds to the challenge (except in the few cases where the date was written on front of the image large enough to see even in the little thumbnail views). And the back sides are not shown, certainly an important clue for dating images — but hey, it is just a game.
Images are selected at random, so even in a short game you may see duplicates — play for long and you will certainly see the same image more than once. Currently, there are over 300 images in the game. Just go to the Photohistory link at the top of any ClassyArts.com page, and under the Information heading you will see ClassyArts Photo Dating Game, click on that and you will see an image, and a list of decades at the right. Click on the decade that matches the image, and press the submit button. Another image will appear, along with the results of your selection, and the exact year of the preceding image. If you get it right, your total percentage of correct answers is also displayed. There is no limit to how many turns you take — the game never ends on its own — you decide when to stop playing.
One nice thing about that game (for me) is that each dated image I add to our public domain images collection is automatically added to the game. So play again a month from now, and you will likely have a different selection of images available than you saw today. The game grows as our database grows. Have fun with it!
