August 24, 2011
OldSF.org – Map of the San Francisco Public Library’s Historical Photo Collection
Just plain cool, San Francisco angle » [3] comments
Just received an email from an old contact — and though I’ve not been actively updating Sparkletack, this project is just too fantastic not to mention.
I’ve pillaged the San Francisco History Center’s online photo archive myself many, many times … and often dreamed of a resource exactly like this one.
OldSF.org in Dan’s own words:
“A long time ago you blogged about a map I made of photographs from the Cushman collection.
After much work and many rocky starts, I’ve put together the next incarnation of this: OldSF.org.
It’s a map of the San Francisco Public Library’s Historical Photograph Collection, which contains 40,000 digitized images from San Francisco’s past. We’ve located about 13,000 of them on a map and built an interactive site to help you explore the photographs. It’s a bit like historypin, but it’s focused exclusively on San Francisco and has far more images of SF than historypin does.
There are countless finds in the collection, but here are a few that we enjoyed:
Also worth mentioning: while this is not an SFPL project, it is done with their blessing.
Hope all is well. And many thanks for Sparkletack. Listening to your podcast when I first moved up to the city really sparked my interest in SF History.”
You’re welcome, Dan — and thank YOU!
August 24, 2011 at 7:05 pm
Hello Richard , This is Ray from Florida, its good to hear you back on the site again and im sure it was alot of work keeping the site going all that time with all the reasearch but your podcasts are a treasure trove to those who love San Fran. as a matter of fact I have listened to all the casts at least twice, my commute is exactly an hour and half and many mornings i listen to the old casts forsaking my ringing phone. I miss your new casts but I know nothing stays the same and you have a life to live also. just do us a favor and keep the site and podcast up as long as possible, (I know it cant be free to host) Theres alot of folks that can benefit from it. Oh by the way a great influential person to look up from SF history is James Lick, founder of the observatory in San Jose. he like Alexander Leidesdorff was driven by a broken heart to greatness and eccentricity, very interesting as well. anyway forgive my long comment and I will look up OLDSF.org when able, catch you later.
September 3, 2011 at 5:52 pm
Hi, thank you for your blog. Do you know by any chance who is behind this project (oldsf.org)? Thank you.
~Yana
November 1, 2011 at 12:46 pm
Hi Richard, it’s so good to read a new post on your wonderful blog! I know that there is hard work behind a project of this kind (and you always delivered great quality content), but it would be great to have more articles in the future…
Goodbye from your faithful reader from Italy!