Posted January 30, 20214 yr Hi people, Is there any interest here in a catalog image archive? About four years ago, the pending demise of Bon Ton spurred me into action, archiving the entirety of their catalog images. Likewise with Sears, although that one still lives on. Since then, I've been hanging around digital archivist's forums and my side hobby sort of grew into a major undertaking. I wrote my own software to automate the HQ downloads and used AI to weed out images of products/clothing-only from the models. I built a website to browse the whole collection, then added features to organize the whole thing. Taking it further, I then added facial recognition on all the images to find the same model across multiple catalogs. Feature-wise, I feel the archive website is pretty complete, but the data (the images) is never complete. I have over 6M images right now from over 70 catalogs. Bellazon has been extremely helpful in putting names to faces, using the site's facial recognition capabilities. I would be immensely happy to have some assistance on identifying models and also some suggestions on what catalogs to archive next. Maybe for some of the adventurous, I could instruct on how to use my archiving tools to mass-download the images to add to the archive. Does this pique anyone's interest to hear more?
January 31, 20214 yr Wow...you bet! As for catalogs, Peter Hahn, Madeleine, Kaleidoscope, Otto, Baur...the list goes on.
January 31, 20214 yr Author Cool! Anyone interested can browse the archive at https://tablinum.net. I will start with Peter Hahn right away. Thanks for the suggestions!
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