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The New York Times Digitizes Millions of Photos Going Back To 19th Century (betanews.com) 29

The New York Times is digitizing millions of historical photos dating back to 1896. From a report: The NYT has a massive collection of photos dating back decades, and the plan is to digitize millions of images -- some dating back to the late nineteenth century -- to ensure they can be accessed by generations to come. The digitization process will also prove useful for journalists who will be able to delve into the archives far more easily in future. Until now, historic news articles and photos have been stored on microfilm and in other physical forms. This is not only difficult to catalog and navigate, but also prone to deterioration over time and through use. The newspaper is using Google Cloud for the digitization.
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The New York Times Digitizes Millions of Photos Going Back To 19th Century

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  • Highlander (Score:4, Funny)

    by Anonymous Coward on Friday November 09, 2018 @01:24PM (#57618154)

    This will come in handy for catching time-travelers and immortals.

  • by Anonymous Coward on Friday November 09, 2018 @01:31PM (#57618202)

    > The newspaper is using Google Cloud for the digitization.

    But what I would like to know is what brand of hard drive the images are stored on. Also the favorite coffee brand of the main developer.

    Who on earth is interested in what cloud provider they used except for Google's marketing department?

    • by colinwb ( 827584 )
      Another interested party might be the New York Times if they get a discount for mentioning that Google Cloud is being used.
    • > The newspaper is using Google Cloud for the digitization.

      But what I would like to know is what brand of hard drive the images are stored on. Also the favorite coffee brand of the main developer.

      Who on earth is interested in what cloud provider they used except for Google's marketing department?

      I think you answered your own question. It's so important that not only do they mention Google Cloud, but they put "google_cloud" into the name for the link for the story itself.

  • by bobstreo ( 1320787 ) on Friday November 09, 2018 @01:51PM (#57618280)

    how many of the images are considered to be in public domain?

    Just because you digitize something doesn't mean you own the rights to the image.

    Sounds like a combination of cash grab and physical space savings.

    Hope they're using a lossless/high res algorithm to preserve the images.

  • If their algorithms don't like the images, they're likely to lock the NYT out or delete the contents of the drive.

    I'm not sure there are any vendors out there I'd trust. I'd suggest buying a large number of commodity drives (they don't have to be perfect) and place them in groups of six to make a RAID 6 drive. It's not that expensive, especially compared to rebuilding the archive if/when things go wrong.

    If this is a do-once sort of thing, once it's done it's done and if it crashes it is lost forever, then t

  • Most towns have historical societies, many of which have boxes full of fading photographs. Digitizing those photos is something they should be doing. As a bonus, a lot of fading can be undone with free software.
  • If it ain't film it ain't real

It is contrary to reasoning to say that there is a vacuum or space in which there is absolutely nothing. -- Descartes

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