Picture Australia

Today I discovered the outstanding Picture Australia website.

According to the About page: Picture Australia is an internet-based service that allows you to search many significant online pictorial collections at the same time. When you search on Picture Australia, thumbnail images are retrieved from participating institutions on the fly and inserted into the search results.

Participating institutions include libraries, universities, museums and the Australian War Memorial.

Clicking on an image takes you to the institution’s website for details about the picture.

This is a fantastic use of technology, providing broad public access to cultural and historical treasures. It’s a wonderful tool for researchers, saving countless hours and cost.

It’s all under the umbrella of the National Library of Australia as part of the Trove, which is an online collection of digitised archives including newspapers, journals, photographs, diaries and audio.

I’ve done image searches in Trove before, but the Picture Australia page is cleaner and more visually appealing.

Something I hadn’t seen before was the ability for individuals to contribute photographs.

It’s as simple as joining the Picture Australia Flickr group for People, Places and Events.

I added a few photos and will be interested to see if they become part of the collection.

All of this makes it much easier for historians and genealogists to share and find information.

Update: The pictures I uploaded to Flickr are now part of the Picture Australia archive.