What happened to Picture the Past?

[barclaycon 569]

One of the really good resources for Notts pictures was Picture the Past.

But it all seems to have changed now.

Picture the past now seems to be all Derbyshire pictures, and photo's of Nottinghamshire moved to a new site: Picturenottingham.

However a lot of the photo's have gone missing and are no longer on any of those sites.

I made a note of some photo's some time ago, but they have just disappeared. Any photo with a number starting NCC has gone.

Pictures of my old school and parts of Bramcote no longer available.

Does anyone have any idea where they've been moved to - or have just been ditched completely?

 

[Stuart.C 491]

There's a lot of NCC / Nottinghamshire photos on the link below,
The only problem being you can't search for the NCC ones, they're all indexed by Inspire numbers.
You'll have to search for subject / location again

 

https://www.inspirepicturearchive.org.uk/

[Cliff Ton 10,470]

It all happened several (at least 6 or 7) years ago. PTP was funded by several organisations and councils, including Notts and Derbys, and Notts CC didn’t want to be part of it any longer.   Most of the Nottingham pictures on PTP were transferred to PictureNottingham, and PTP became primarily Derbyshire.

But for some reason, a number of Nottingham photos remained on PTP even after PictureNottingham was created, so it’s not totally cut-and-dried.

 

I don’t like PN at all. They have a strong watermark across all their photos, which is obviously intended to stop people copying them into other places. They only see it as something to generate revenue. But the watermark is so strong that it’s difficult to see the photo even if you’re only casually browsing; making the whole thing pointless.

I sent a lot of my own photos to PTP so they could be seen by a wider audience, but I won’t sent anything to PN because they ruin everything with their watermark.

 

The old  reference numbers on PTP are no longer valid following the change, but I just put ‘Bramcote’ in the Search box on PN and got 96 results, which may include some of those you referred to. As far as I’m aware nothing was ‘ditched’; you’ll just need to search for them again on whichever site.

 

The whole thing was a step backwards. No way was it an improvement.

[barclaycon 569]

Thanks for your replies fellas.

It is indeed deeply frustrating that they only want to sell you photo's and go to great lengths to make sure that you can't copy them without a watermark.

I made a note of a lot of photo's - intending to either buy them or view them in greater detail later. I did copy the tiny sample photo at the time to remind myself of what they were, but it would seem that the powers that be just decided to re-organise everything.

The same thing happened with Old Maps -who were a good resource but watermarked into oblivion. In they end the whole site was just ditched because people wouldn't pay their stupid prices. If they had made prints available at a reasonable cost then people would have been only too glad to pay for a download. Transport Library for example only charge 99p for each of their photo downloads and they are beautifully scanned and well worth while.

Sites like Alamy and Getty Images want to charge £10 and more for photo's that they inherited from newspapers (or from contributors like Cliff).

I haven't had much luck tracking down my list of NCC prefixed photo's so far. I'm about to give the 'inspirepicturearchive' a try.

Thanks again.