We’re coming down the home stretch, getting ready to introduce the newest version of Genlighten at our RootsTech exhibit booth on February 3-6, 2016.
Dean is doing the heavy-duty Rails coding for new website, but I try to help with whatever I can and today I’ve been looking for photos to use as profile image placeholders until site users upload something of their own.
I found some interesting pictures on our favorite stock photo website but I also had a wonderful time looking at The New York Public Library Digital Collections to see if there was anything there that would work. Images in the Library’s digital collections that have no known United States copyright restrictions can be downloaded and used without the Library’s permission–but, of course, a credit with a link back to the site is a welcomed courtesy. The guidelines for using the digital files on the website can be found here.
The key to finding the public domain images was to limit the search. From the main screen, I checked the “Search only public domain materials” box before clicking on the blue magnifying glass search button.
Clik here to view.
Search box
The results showed that the filter was on
Image may be NSFW.
Clik here to view.
and when I clicked through to an image, I saw the “Free to use without restriction” note below the download buttons.
Clik here to view.
Download screen
I confess. Whenever I’m testing out a new database, I usually type in “banjo” or “fiddle” because old-time music is a love of mine, and I had fun looking at the banjo results on the New York Public Library site today–advertisements, sheet music covers, stereo cards, and vintage drawings, both color and black and white. My two favorite music-related images didn’t have the “Free to use without restriction” tag but I did stumble on one banjo image to download (it didn’t come up in the keyword search) and I selected a number of interesting pictures from the Farm Security Administration Photographs after searching that part of the database for “family.”
Image may be NSFW.
Clik here to view.
When you first log into the new Genlighten website–it’s not quite ready yet, but we’ll let you know when it is–you might find that there are two young men in your default profile image, both holding five-stringed instruments of the happiest kind. If the picture doesn’t take your fancy like it did mine, you can change it with a few clicks of your mouse! But now you’ll know the story of how it found its way there. Image may be NSFW.
Clik here to view.
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The Miriam and Ira D. Wallach Division of Art, Prints and Photographs: Photography Collection, The New York Public Library. “Members of the Musgrove family, Westmoreland County, Pennsylvania” New York Public Library Digital Collections. Accessed January 8, 2016. http://digitalcollections.nypl.org/items/19563d90-da36-0132-ccc9-58d385a7bbd0
