British Pathe Launches Photo Archive

Remember that British Pathe newsreel archive that was covered in ResearchBuzz not too long ago? Now from the same source comes a database of over 12 million historic photographs. The database was actually generated by scanning all of the newsreel archives' thousands of hours of film. The archive can be reached at http://www.britishpathe.com/stills.cfm .

The front page has some sample stills (Twiggy!) as well as some instructions for searching the site. There's a search form at the top of the site; when I searched for Chaplin I got 83 results. (Be sure to check out the film from 1931, "Charlie Meets Gandhi.") If you searched the newsreel archive these results will look familiar; you'll see options for viewing three different qualities of film.

Click on the thumbnail on the left side of the page and you'll have a layout of stills from the video, along with the option to view a frame for every certain number of seconds and a certain number of frames per page. Warning: at the moment this site is very, very slow. I'd get a minimum number of frames per page until the feature's newness has worn off.

Posted to Countries-United Kingdom