News on 6: Tulsa Historical Society And Museum Adds 50,000 Photos To Online Archive. “The Tulsa Historical Society and Museum has now added 50,000 of its photos online. This means anyone can view pieces of Tulsa’s history, any time they want and all for free.”
Make Tech Easier: 6 iPhone Apps to Make Your Photos Look Like Film. “The iPhone has made photography more accessible than ever before. With this prevalence in society, it raises the question, how do I get my photos to stand out? Film Photography seems to be the answer. Thanks to technology, there’s a whole range of applications designed to imitate this effect. The iPhone apps listed below will make your photos look like vintage film.”
Chicago Tribune / Elkin Courier-News: Thanks to grant and hours of museum volunteer work, old Elgin newspaper photos now available online. “Hundreds of old black-and-white photos capturing decades of Elgin’s past are now online for the world to view thanks to the work of Elgin History Museum volunteers and a grant from the Institute of Museum and Library Services. Negatives of photos taken by The Courier-News between 1936 and 1994 were donated to the museum in the 1990s, museum curator Beth Nawara said. The images are being digitized so they can be made available electronically.” This project has just started — they’re about 3,000 pictures in to a collection of 100,000 images.
University of North Carolina: Carolina Libraries acquires archive of renowned photographer Roland L. Freeman. “The collection at Wilson Library is a massive compilation of assignment and project work by Freeman from a career that spans more than fifty years of documenting Black communities, public figures and folk art and artisans. It consists of nearly 24,000 slides, 10,000 photographic prints, 400,000 negatives and 9,000 contact sheets. Also included are publications and an archive of Freeman’s papers.”
The Press of Atlantic City: Black History Month at Atlantic City Library strengthened by digitized collection. “The Atlantic City Library marked Black History Month by touting its newly digitized repository ‘The City of Dreams: The Atlantic City Experience.’ The repository, the digitization of which was facilitated by a federal grant, features about 14,000 items from 25 collections that tell the story of the Black community in Atlantic City and the impacts it has made both locally in South Jersey and across the country.”
Hackaday: This Camera Produces A Picture, Using The Scene Before It. “It’s the most basic of functions for a camera, that when you point it at a scene, it produces a photograph of what it sees. [Jasper van Loenen] has created a camera that does just that, but not perhaps in the way we might expect. Instead of committing pixels to memory it takes a picture, uses AI to generate a text description of what is in the picture, and then uses another AI to generate an image from that picture.”
Chicago Sun-Times: Newberry Library online exhibition showcases images from the Great Migration. “A new chapter in Black American history is unfolding at the Newberry Library, courtesy of a recently acquired glass slides collection highlighting the significance of Chicago and several other Northern cities during the Great Migration in the early 1920s. The Great Migration was the movement of millions of African Americans from the rural South to the urban Midwest, Northeast and West.”
Smithsonian Magazine: See Rare Images of Early 20th-Century Antarctic Expeditions. “A trove of historic images from early 20th-century Australian and British expeditions to Antarctica is officially available to the public, the National Archives of Australia (NAA) announced this week. Once held by the Australian Antarctic Division, the collection—hundreds of photos, lantern slides and glass plate negatives—has been transferred to the NAA.”
BuzzFeed News: Even Fitness Influencers Are Fed Up With The Amount Of Lies, Photo Editing, And Manipulation That Go Into Fitspo Social Media Posts. “A slightly bigger bicep, a more cinched waist — a huge amount of fitness influencers are editing their posts, and it’s screwing everyone over.”
Ars Technica: Viral Instagram photographer has a confession: His photos are AI-generated. “With over 26,000 followers, Jos Avery’s Instagram account has a trick up its sleeve. While it may appear to showcase stunning photo portraits of people, they are not actually people at all. Avery has been posting AI-generated portraits for the past few months, and as more fans praise his apparently masterful photography skills, he has grown nervous about telling the truth.”
MakeUseOf: Make Old Low-Resolution Images Look Great on Linux With Upscayl. “Fortunately, the same kind of machine learning and image enhancement carried out by high-end phones, can be carried out on your Linux PC. Upscayl takes any JPG, PNG, or WEBP image as input, and allows you to select from a variety of upscaling options. The resulting images are suitable for use as glorious desktop backgrounds, and you can even batch-process multiple image files, bringing entire photo albums up to date, and looking good.” This is a bit more technical than most of the articles I include, but I know a lot of genealogists read ResearchBuzz and this looks like a powerful tool.
Vietnam+: Vietnam – France joint website of archive photos launched. “A joint website featuring archive photos from the French School of Asian Studies (EFEO) and the Institute of Social Sciences Information at the Vietnam Academy of Social Sciences was officially launched on February 15.”
Boing Boing: Fun game makes you guess what year a photo was taken. “Chronophoto presents the player with a photo and a timeline ranging from 1900 to current times. The closer you get to the exact year of the photograph’s creation, the more points you’ll be awarded.”
ABC News (Australia): Murray River flood photos on social media to help create archive for future planning. “When water levels along the South Australian stretch of the river started increasing in mid-to-late 2022, so too did the number of photographs capturing the changing landscape. Multiple social media pages dedicated to sharing visual updates of floodwaters have gained thousands of audience members far and wide.”
New-to-me (launched in October) from New Zealand Herald: Ocean photography project Project Kahurangi launched to give non-profit conservation groups a boost. “The library, which has over 1200 professional-quality images and videos, launched in October with the help of Live Ocean Foundation, another conservation-focused non-profit started by America’s Cup champions Peter Burling and Blair Tuke. The content is free for fellow non-profit advocacy groups, as well as iwi, governments and education institutions looking to promote ocean conservation.”
