Internet Archive will upload over 14 million free historical images to Flickr

One of the employees of the Internet Archive has developed a program to automatically extract illustrations from millions of books in the process of OCR scanning, which is now carried out by the Internet Archive. Kalev Lytaru (Kalev Leetaru) used an existing text recognition module: he first defined the boundaries of the illustrations to discard the illustrations in front of the OCR. But why should the material disappear?

All extracted illustrations were aligned, framed, cleaned and uploaded to Flickr photo hosting with accompanying text from the book. Thus, full-text search is possible in the archive of Internet Archive Book Images illustrations that are in the public domain.
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A total of 14 million pictures will be uploaded to Flickr (2.6 million are currently uploaded).



Gallery of pictures from old books is a very exciting thing. Here you can find landscapes, illustrations on culinary business, and notes, and pictures from medical reference books, and old maps. A catalog of illustrations invites you to a kind of “time travel”: enter a term (phone, plane) - and see how this thing looked before.





Many pictures are some strange incomprehensible objects from the past. Without a description and you will not understand what it is.



Surely Wikipedia editors will find suitable illustrative material to fill up many historical articles.

For each illustration, the name of the book, the year of its publication and the page on which the illustration met are indicated. There is a link to read the book online (all of them are published on the Internet Archive site). As part of this project, 600 million pages have already been digitized.

Anyone can do anything with these images, including use for non-commercial or commercial purposes, republishing, editing, etc.