Powerhouse joins The Commons on Flickr!

Today we are very excited to announce that we are the first Museum internationally to join the Commons project on Flickr. This project is about increasing access of publicly held photographic collections that have no known copyright restrictions.

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

We are initially contributing 200 amazing historical images from our Tyrrell Photographic Collection and then will continue to release more on a weekly basis. Our Tyrrell Collection consists of 7903 plates from the two principal photographic studios in Sydney in the late 1800s to early 1900s. These were the Charles Kerry and the Henry King studios.

The collection was bought by James R. Tyrrell in 1929 and later sold to Australian Consolidated Press who donated it to us in 1985. These images are mainly of the Sydney area with a few from regional spots.

We would love you to look at these images and add your personal descriptive tags and comments relating to the images. We are very curious about the responses you may submit. Some of the images in this collection do not have much data so it will be great if we can get this from you.

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 as we can, this is called geo-mapping. If you look at the images and then go to our map you can see how this works. This is a great way of finding images according to location and you can see images posted by other people from the same spot.

If you have a Flickr account you may want to place your images on the map taken from the same location and we can check them out.
Flickr for geo-mapping of our images.

The image above is ‘Bondi Bay, Sydney’, Henry King, Sydney, Australia, c. 1880-1900. This reproduction was scanned from a glass plate negative. We are going to post Tyrrell images on this blog for the next week to celebrate and will continue to highlight them in the future.

We hope you enjoy looking through these incredible images! It has been great for us to look through them whilst working on the project, some of which we haven’t seen before either. The mapping of our images has been a great highlight for us. Please add your comments on this blog too, we would love to know your thoughts on this!