Snapshots of the past, online

The National Photographic Archive has been putting its 630,000 prints online so that we can all see how we lived in the past – including the upstairs-downstairs life of the big house

REMEMBER WHEN WE used to rush to the shop to collect the envelope stuffed with precious photographs from the holidays? Most of them got lost, of course. A few stragglers made it into frames or albums or the Jacob’s Afternoon Tea box on top of the wardrobe. It was often a random selection rather than a deliberate choice: whatever happened to survive.

But at least those images made it into the real world. Since the advent of digital cameras and camera phones we’ve all been snapping away to our heart’s content. But who actually tidies up, prints out, stores and captions this plethora of images? Unless you’re frighteningly anal-retentive, or have shockingly little to do, the chances are that your digital photos languish in your computer in an unloved and untended electronic heap.

If you’ve glanced at this pile recently only to look away in despair, spare a thought for the folks at the National Photographic Archive. On our behalf, and on behalf of future generations, they care for 630,000 photographs of Irish interest – and over the past two years they have been digitising this enormous visual trove so that it can be accessed online, with very little effort, by everyone.

It is, as librarian Elizabeth Kirwan explains, a huge task. “Each image is scanned in at a high resolution in the National Library’s digitisation studio,” she says. That’s tricky enough when you’re dealing with an image from an album or a glass-plate negative, but it’s only the start of it. “Metadata” – or information about the photograph, such as its size and format, as well as what it is of and who took it – “has to accompany each of the images, and the whole lot has to be married and uploaded to the library’s website.”

About 34,000 images are available online at the moment, in a series of collections from different sources. The Clarke collection contains 76 photographs of Dubliners taken by a medical student named JJ Clarke between 1897 and 1904. The Eason collection consists of 2,772 images of Ireland created for the postcard trade between 1900 and 1940. The Lawrence Royal Cabinet Collection boasts a jaw-dropping 19,272 commercially produced photographs taken between 1870 and 1914. The latter is currently being digitised, which will add another 5,000 images to the online collection.

The website, Kirwan reports, has registered hits not just from Ireland, the US and across the EU but from as far afield as Iran. “People who access the archive are doing a huge range of things, from family histories through sporting events and historical figures to academic publications,” she says. “The range of subjects is vast: it covers just about everything. It could be horses, or Dublin city or, well, pick a topic.”

That’s exactly what the archive has done for its current exhibition, Power and Privilege: Photographs of the Big House in Ireland 1858-1922. This is much less stuffy than it sounds; selected on the basis of the people they showed, the images offer a fascinating glimpse into the upstairs-downstairs life that was a reality for many Irish people not so very long ago. “This was a period of enormous change in Irish history,” says Kirwan, “and the photographs reflect that.” Many of them are also astoundingly beautiful.

For anyone with an interest in social history, architecture or photography, a high-resolution print would make a superb Christmas gift – and, at €13 for a 10in by 8in black-and-white image or €25 for colour, a modestly priced one.

Many of the people in the big-house photographs, whether gentry or staff, remain unidentified. So there’s an open invitation from the National Library for visitors to submit information about people or a house they recognise. The exhibition will be digitised later this year, and there are links to social- networking sites and Flickr for ease of access.

If some pictures remain stubbornly silent, others speak volumes. “To give you an example of the kind of thing you can find out from photographs,” Kirwan says, “in the last couple of years we had an inquiry about the second World War. As you probably know, the weather forecasts were not published in newspapers during the war, for military-security reasons, so a researcher went through photographs from certain periods or events, which were recorded in various places, and looked at the weather in the background, and managed to compile a record from that. They’re a fabulous source, not just from a social-history point of view: you can tell quite a bit about other, almost incidental, things as well.”

From this perspective the basement of the gallery, in Temple Bar, is an Aladdin's cave of information. Here live the 636,000 images that make up the world's largest collection of Irish photographs. There are lantern slides, big, heavy glass negatives and a contraption for viewing stereoscopic images that looks for all the world like a primitive set of 3-D glasses. Those of the archive's photographs that have already been filed sit demurely in acid-free boxes. Others, among them the not-inconsiderable archive of the former Irish Pressphotographer Colman Doyle, wait their turn in Jiffy bags, assorted envelopes and, yes, Jacob's biscuit tins.

It’s a fascinating place. And guess what: it makes the mayhem of the image folder on my laptop look like an afternoon tea party.

Power and Privilege: Photographs of the Big House in Ireland 1858-1922 continues at the National Photograph Archive, Meeting House Square, Dublin 2, until next spring. You can browse the photographs or order prints at nli.ie, the National Library of Ireland’s website

Picture this: How to delve into the RTÉ and 'Irish Times' archives

RTÉ, which began its digitisation project in 1996, now has 70,000 images in its online photographic archive, at rte.ie. As well as shots of U2 they include stills from television programmes, sporting events and the RTÉ Guide, as well as the Johnson collection – photographs of Dublin taken in the 1950s – and the Cashman collection, a series of studies of the Easter Rising, the War of Independence and the Civil War. The latter features the well-known image of Jim Larkin addressing a crowd on O’Connell Street in Dublin in 1923. RTÉ sells A4 prints for personal use for €20.

The Irish Timesphotographic archive is also available to browse online, at irishtimes.com. Many of the photographs didn't make it into the paper – for reasons of space, not quality – so it offers a behind-the-scenes peek at momentous political moments, public events such as funerals, protests and festivals, stunning landscapes and quirky portraits. A 10in by 8in print costs €20.