Powerhouse joins The Commons on Flickr

April 8, 2008: The Powerhouse Museum is the first museum in the world to release publicly-held historical photographs for access on Flickr, one of the largest online photo communities in the world. The Museum joins the world’s largest photo library, the US Library of Congress, which released its first photos for public access on Flickr in January this year.

Known as The Commons on Flickr, the online initiative was launched by Flickr to share the collections of cultural institutions worldwide and to make historical photos more widely accessible to a global community.

This exciting initiative encourages the public to add tags and comments to the images that in turn will allow us to feed this data back to our collection records.

One of the exciting things we have done with this collection is place as many of them on a map according to their longitude and latitude coordinates, this is called geo-mapping. This is a great way of finding images according to location and you can see images posted by other people from the same spot.

Representing some of the most significant examples of early Australian photography, the Tyrrell Collection is a series of glass plate negatives by Charles Kerry (1857-1928) and Henry King (1855-1923), two of Sydney's principal photographic studios at the time. Further images from the Collection will be regularly released by the Powerhouse on Flickr.

Until now, the Tyrrell Collection has only been available on the Powerhouse Museum website, accessed by specialist audiences rather than the wider global community known to Flickr. The Powerhouse continues to offer high-quality prints of Tyrrell images for purchase as well as high-resolution versions for commercial publication.

View our images on The Commons on Flickr