Four new pictures up on Flickr

I put about 10 new pictures up on Flickr in the past few days.

Pictures are still going up on Flickr

While we haven't been linking to them as often, the Archives is still posting pictures on the Museum's Flickr site and we put up two images of Civil War soldiers yesterday. Stop in and check them out - 930,000* other viewers can't be wrong.

*but I can - it's 971,000 viewers as of today. 5 new pictures for this afternoon too.

...and what are we doing?

Anyone have any idea why our Flickr account got 26,000 hits last Friday?

Stats for: Your account
← Friday, Jan 22 2010 →

Your most viewed photos and videos
Visits %
Photos and Videos 20,917 78%
Photostream 2,244 8%
Sets 3,448 12%
Collections 0 0%

Why we do this

Today we got an email in the archives from a man in California who found pictures of his mother, a World War 2 nurse, on our Flickr page. His mother's 87th birthday is coming soon and he wants to print one of the photos for her. He said he's not sure she knows these photos exist.

So many of our images have no or very little information, but in this case his mother's name was spelled out in the caption to all four!!! photos of her. I have often said to myself, as I am posting this kind of detail, that someone is going to be trolling the internet, looking for their mom or dad, and may very well find one of the things we've tossed up there.

It's exactly this reason that we do what we do, with the hope that we're the connection between today and yesterday. Have I said I love my job?

900,000 and counting

We've broken the 900,000 mark on our Flickr account. Hot dog. That's an average of about 524 views per image. But our most-viewed image?

MIS 66-9275 has 63,345 views

Can we make 1,000,000 Flickr views in 2009?

We're at 898,380 photostream views now. Or 1,149,005 photos and video views. I'm not sure what the difference is, but anyone who wants to help push our Flickr views over 1 million will be appreciated. Since we've figured out how to email pictures to the site, I'm sure there will be more to view.

Otis Archives' Flickr image used to make art

Joanna of Morbid Anatomy pointed out that Tanya Johnston used some images from the Ball Collection on the Archives' Flickr site to make a piece of artwork. Cool! That's what public domain is all about.

To see it, click through the link to her site, click on illustration at the top, and then click on the right arrow to get to the second page of illustrations. It's the bit with all the eyes in the middle.

Latest Flickr statistics

1,625 items - 885,625 views.

This mustard gas testing shot has been popular lately:



We're working on a project to get many 700,000 images we currently have scanned online for searching and use (although as many as 50,000 of those are book pages we've already loaded onto Internet Archive). Stay tuned for more details.

You never know what you'll find in the archives

Balkan Owls, ca 1913, by Merl LaVoy. (Reeve 39645)

And our Flickr stats for the moment stand at 1,618 items / 876,972 views, up only ~7000 views in the two weeks from Sept 15th when I posted 1,605 items / 870,097 views.

Flickr picture statistics

Since the Flickr site is blocked at work, we've been spending less time updating it - it's no longer a useful tool for showing researchers a picture we're trying to describe over the telephone for example. But our current statistics are 1,605 items / 870,097 views. I put up a new Korean War-era prosthetic photo tonight.

This is what the Creative Commons is all about

Originally uploaded by jrmyst

I just found this on Flickr, an original and creative use of one of our images, a medical illustration by DK Winter. Far out.

Flickr picture statistics

I spoke to someone who's writing a paper on Flickr use by archives the other day, so here's our most recent stats:

View counts

So far today Yesterday All time
Photos and Videos 295 689 1,049,485
Photostream 205 461 843,269
Sets 41 192 66,807

Total 541 1,342 1,959,561

Walter Reed Army Institute of Research photographic collection

WRAIR~D1784Photo by HOCH, January 1977. BRAZIL~ANIMALS MARABA FISH.

In the 1960s and 70s (and possibly longer), doctors trained by the Walter Reed Army Institute of Research (WRAIR) were sent out to investigate tropical medicine while given cameras and film to document what they found. WRAIR had many photographs including film teams, all over the world including in Vietnam. The Vietnam still photos went to the National Archives when WRAIR moved into its current building, and the Medical Museum got 1/2 of the other still pictures that were left. We're now scanning WRAIR's third (thanks to their providing funding) and our third to create a digital collection that can be used by WRAIR and our researchers.


WRAIR D1783. Photo by HOCH, January 1977. BRAZIL - HIGHWAYS MARABA T-AM GOSLOS BRIDGE CONSTRUCTION.

I put these samples of the first test batch of scans on Flickr. The captions are limited because they're being taken from a printout of an early computerized catalogue. As you can see, not all of the pictures deal directly with medicine.


WRAIR D1762. January 1977. BRAZIL~UPPER TORSO MARABA BLACK FLY BITES CPT HOCH.

Delousing WW1 photos and Flickr stats

Sterilizer. 01/21/1919. LeManns [Le Mans?], Sarthe, France. View of sterilizer. Interior. At salvage branch, American Embarkation Center. Delouser.

Our Flickr stats are at 1,307 items / 793,036 views this evening, slowly closing in on 800K, in spite of a series of WW1 delousing photographs that Kathleen put up recently.



German delousing and bathing plant. Interior view. Steam delouser compartments. Andenaide?, Belgium. 11/14/1918.

White House on Flickr; can we be far behind?

Keith Axline at Wired says that the White House put up almost 300 photographs on Flickr this week.

"Perhaps we'll be able to post pictures from work again someday...," the photo archivist noted wistfully.

Feast or famine on these posts

We hit a dry spell over the weekend on posting to this blog, and if you were anywhere near the DC area you would know why - we hit that sweet, sweet spot of weather with blue skies and temps in the high 60s and had, sorry to say, better things to occupy us. Wait! Not yesterday, but Friday and Saturday - oh, yeah.

However, our faithful over at Flickr put us over 775,000 views last night, so maybe their weather wasn't nearly as nice as ours.

Many thanks to all of you who keep those numbers going.

Army.mil

I was cruising through Flickr and came across an account called Army.mil, with just short of 4000 images. Surely they're not posting from home, not 4000 images! So I emailed them and asked. No, they have privileges because they're the "Web team" and have access to sites others might not have. I want to be a Web team. How do I go about that?

We got yer tractors!

Amphibious and farming and train and fogging - over at Flickr.

The theme of the day is Latrines

You will not believe how hard it is to look for pictures to upload to Flickr. Today I was looking for something else when a picture of a latrine caught my eye and I had an "aha!" moment. Peruse at your leisure.

Arm and leg prosthetics in the making

A dozen photos of arm and leg prosthetics being created have just been posted to our Flickr account. These are some of those behind-the-scenes images I really like. We probably have all seen finished products, but don't usually see how they're made.