Powerhouse joins The Commons on Flickr

About the Commons on Flickr
In April 2008, The Powerhouse Museum was the first museum in the world to release publicly-held historical photographs for access on Flickr, one of the largest online photo communities in the world. The Museum joins the world’s largest photo library, the US Library of Congress, which released its first photos for public access on Flickr in January this year.

Known as The Commons on Flickr, the online initiative was launched by Flickr to share the collections of cultural institutions worldwide and to make historical photos more widely accessible to a global community.  This exciting initiative encourages the public to add tags and comments to the images that in turn will allow us to feed this data back to our collection records.

Our Commons photographs
The Museum has now uploaded over 600 images from its Tyrrell Collection for the Commons on Flickr. We continue to add new images every week and, where possible, mapping them too! We need your help - if you know more about the locations or people in these photos, or can help tag them, it would be great!

Tyrrell Today group
Due to the overwhelming interest in these images we decided to start a group called Tyrrell Today.  This group is about extending the collection to our members and getting them to post their contemporary shots from the same location as our historic images.  The idea is to observe the changes, or not, that have occurred since the images were originally taken and share this process with our members.  We currently have over 120 images and 143 members who are going to great lengths to take new images to match the locations. more...

George Street at Hunter Street, Sydney   George Street at Hunter Street, Sydney . Tyrell Today

[contemporary image by lifeasdaddy]

A rest on the road Cat birds Meal break for teamsters and horses Ocean Wave Hotel
Princes Lane looking south, The Rocks Shearing, round the flank General Post Office Young girl in Red Cross uniform
Departure of troopships 'Australian' and 'Iberia' for the Soudan Sydney Harbour from Government House King Street East, Sydney Sydney Harbour from R.Y.S. grounds
Koala The Three Sisters, Katoomba, Blue Mountains, NSW Nankeen and white cranes A modern Australian shearer

View our images on The Commons on Flickr

flickr

About the Tyrrell Collection
The Tyrrell Collection consists of 7903 glass plate negatives from the studios of Charles Kerry (1857-1928) and Henry King (1855-1923) who had two of Sydney's principal photographic studios in the late 1800s and early 1900s. The collection – an important record of city and country life - was bought by James R. Tyrrell in 1929 and sold in 1980 to Australian Consolidated Press who donated it to the Museum in 1985. Find out more about the Tyrrell Collection.  You can order a print or high resolution file from this collection through the Photo Library.