What We Can Learn from the NY Times’s Massive Photo Digitizing Project

June 21, 2019

If you are like most people, you are likely to have at least a couple of thousand old prints boxed up and stored in an attic or dark closet. That number is high enough to deter most people from getting their old photo scanning project off the ground. Even if they know that they don’t have to tackle it by themselves; that it’s possible – and even advisable – to rope in a reliable professional scanning service to help with the tedious parts.

But if, like the New York Times, you have something like six million old photos in your archives, then it calls for industrial grade scanning support and strategies to see you through it.

The old photos were stored in the Times morgue, a giant underground repository of old newspaper clippings, images and books. As the digitizing project got underway, a ten person team worked steadily to get photos out of physical drawers and folders, feed them through heavy duty scanners and then, with some help from Google, catalog and archive them digitally.

Why was this effort so important to the Times? Like other legacy publishers, the Times decided to take the plunge and digitize its massive image collection when it realized how valuable these photos were as windows into the past.

As Monica Drake, an editor at the newspaper said:

“We have covered the world for such a long time we just have this vast store of information. The immediate goal is to take advantage of all this material and information we’ve gathered for so long and bring it back to life.

One way the Times is doing this is through an archival storytelling project called Past Tense. Since it was started last year, the Past Tense team has already begun plumbing the Times photo archive for interesting feature stories. These have included recreating photos of iconic New York sites first taken in 1951; an exploration of dance photography, a look at the City during rainy days from the past, and a lot more.

Many of these photos and the stories behind are now part of the NYT’s archival Instagram page, to give us a dose of both history and nostalgia. Here are a few of our favorites….

Scenes of Summer: Road trip ready; A resourceful kid in the city; Coney Island fun ride

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Summer has officially begun, which means families across America will be loading up their cars with sleeping bags and beach towels and setting off on adventures. The soundtrack to the season is a chorus of “How much farther?” and “Are we there yet?” Whether you’re headed to the city or the country, the mountains or the sea, a cherished traditional spot or a destination as-yet-unknown, it’s less about where you and your loved ones are going than how you’re leaving your everyday lives behind, together. This Staten Island family was thrilled to ditch their borough for a pre-Airbnb home-swap on the Canadian border in 1972. “The description of the house seemed to meet our vacation requirements precisely,” the original caption read. “An escape to nature with adequate room for our 6 children in an exotic-sounding spot not more than one day’s drive from New York.” Photograph by Dennis Chalkin/The New York Times (Story by @vvchambers. Link in bio.) #nytimes #nytarchives

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The hashtag #SundayFunday might be relatively new, but the sentiment goes back decades. You can see it in this photo taken by our photographer Barton Silverman on a hot Sunday in June 1976. “Youngsters cool off by riding the Water Flume at Astroland, Coney Island,” read the caption that was published in @nytimes. Pictured, from front to back, are Fatman Ekinci, 5; her brothers, Kris, 7, and Fevzi, 9; and in the background, Lillian Pacheco, 7. Astroland was first mentioned by @nytimes on September 13, 1962, when the paper called it “the first major project for frivolous purposes in Coney Island in 25 years.” But the park’s final #SundayFunday came in September 2008. The park's owner said the landlord refused to discuss the expiring lease. “This place lets kids trust their legs, they don’t have to worry about cars, and neighborhoods are getting so rough. They’re closing down a legend,” Walter McCoy, a resident of East New York, told @nytimes. And Keyira Serrano told the paper that she spent every summer weekend at Astroland. On Astroland’s final Sunday, she told @nytimes, "we’re going to have all the fun we can, while it lasts." — @adri_ninfa_gio, @nytimes news assistant #ConeyIsland #SundaysInBrooklyn #amusementparks

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Perilous pursuits — for fame, or a paycheck, or both

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A worker who’s really, REALLY on his toes does some perilous-looking spring cleaning at the United Nations on April 17, 1953. “Window cleaners are a very, very passionate bunch,” said David Knowlton, president of the International Window Cleaning Association. “Most of all, in the high-rise industry, it’s the allure of hanging off a building.” There are fewer fatalities than you might expect among cleaners like the intrepid man in this photograph — only a handful a year nationwide. “It’s really personal error that gets in the way, so you just have to stay focused,” says Tony Natoli, of Tony’s Window Cleaning Service. “You only get to fall once.” (Link in bio.) Photograph: Ernie Sisto/The New York Times #nytarchives

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Less than a month after he’d walked on a wire stretched between the tops of the Twin Towers, Philippe Petit performed another striking feat of aerialism at Great Falls in Paterson, New Jersey. “One hundred feet below him,” @nytimes reported, “the brown, murky waters of the Passaic River swirled over boulders, forming a frothy soup filled with sticks, metal pipes, beer cans and at least three automobile tires.” As Petit made the crossing, “dipping his pole from side to side, as if he were rowing a boat,” a crowd of 30,000 watched. Among them was the Times staff photographer Joyce Dopkeen, who snapped this picture of Petit pausing to kneel in the middle of his walk, which took about eight and a half minutes to complete. #nytarchives #JoyceDopkeen

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Reasons to be out and about in the city

If you are inspired by what the New York Times is doing with its photo archive, take a moment to see how you can rescue your own valuable old photos from oblivion. They may not be in a morgue, but shoeboxes and dark basements can have the same effect of keeping them trapped and away from the light of day. It’s time to get them out of the boxes and digitize them so that it’s easier to share these nuggets of photo nostalgia with others. The New York Times has shown us that it’s possible to scale even the tallest of digitizing mountains – with a little bit of help.