The BBC is reporting that millions of historical images are available on Flickr thanks to a researcher creating a searchable database of 12 million historic copyright-free images.
The photos and drawings are sourced from more than 600 million library books scanned in by the Internet Archive organisation.
The images have been difficult to access until now.
Mr Leetaru said digitisation projects had so far focused on words and ignored pictures.
"For all these years all the libraries have been digitising their books, but they have been putting them up as PDFs or text searchable works," he told the BBC.
"They have been focusing on the books as a collection of words. This inverts that.
"Stretching half a millennia, it's amazing to see the total range of images and how the portrayals of things have changed over time.
(Score: 3, Informative) by andrew_t366 on Friday August 29 2014, @07:31PM
I used to use Flickr daily, and it's too bad that the site itself is no longer usable. Since May of last year it's been an uncustomizable Metro'd mess with enormous thumbnails, hidden captions, endless scrolling, and oceans of JavaScript (and advertisers) controlling it all.
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Saturday August 30 2014, @09:34AM
I couldn't agree more. What a sorry mess.
(Score: 2) by Zinho on Friday August 29 2014, @08:20PM
Looks like the author of the webcomic Wondermark [wondermark.com] just had his job made a ton easier.
"Space Exploration is not endless circles in low earth orbit." -Buzz Aldrin