The Photo Detective

If you have a strange family picture or want more information about your photos, this course is for you. Do you know the story of the album? This is one of the topics covered in this course.

When you take family photos, you will look back at their face. This is the moment of binding over time. Maybe you share their nose and their cowboy, but you have a problem

As a photo detective, I found a family history in the photo. It is old. It is new. And all things in between. It is to rediscover the answers to the ancient questions of who, what, when, where, and why. I learned good elements of the story at elementary school. They are an important component of storytelling. When I meet customers, that is a kind of information sharing. They provide what they know and tell them what I saw. The best point is shared sharing. It becomes emotional when someone suddenly notices that the image they show to me is a picture of the ancestor they were looking for. Or, the image of those wearing rare clothes shows what country their ancestors lived in.

They are photo detectives and since the Irish National Library began publishing images to Flickr in 2011, they have figured out people, time and place hidden in old photos. This crowdsourcing has proven to be effective and popular. To date, NLI's account has approximately 350,000 fans and received about 40,000 comments. NLI holds more than 5 million photos that span over 150 years of history, but it does not necessarily have subtitles or other information to identify people, places, dates. Inviting amateur detectives to publish images online and track the details of the photos is the only practical way to fill in many blanks.

Before our photo detective photographed the case, it was just a sad lonely "unidentified photo from Wiltshire's photo collection". Sharon Corbet searched the pictures of other national libraries and followed the house until 18 Abercorn Road in the east wall of Dublin. To my surprise, Sharon discovered that this was once the home of writer and playwright, Sean Okasi. I asked the local politician Maureen O'Sullivan if he could help with identifying the child. Of course she can! From left to right, Catherine Burn, Helen Boyle, Rose Burn, Elaine Kane, Imelda Redmond, Ann Baan. The boy is Ryan twins