From Print to Digital: Making Over a Million Archived Photos Searchable
A block away from the hustle and bustle of Times Square in New York City, buried three floors below street level, lies The New York Times archive. The archive is housed in a sprawling room that is packed with hundreds of steel filing cabinets and cardboard boxes, each containing news clippings, encyclopaedias, photographs and other archival material.

Started in the late 1800s, the archive first served as a collection of news clippings about newsworthy events and people. In the late 1960s, it was merged with a photo library managed by The Times’s art department. The archive (which is sometimes referred to as “the morgue”) now contains tens of millions of news clippings and an estimated five million printed photographs.

Many of these historical documents are available only in print form, however in 2018, The Times embarked on a project — as part of a technology and advertising collaboration with Google — to preserve the photographs in the collection and store them digitally. A team of technicians manually scan about 1,000 photographs per day into a server, and in July, 2019, they scanned their one millionth photograph.

Many of these photographs have found a new life in stories produced by The Times’s archival storytelling project, Past Tense.

With a digital photographic archive now at over a million scans, we needed to build an asset management system that allows Times journalists to search and browse through the photos in the archive from their laptops.

A digital system inspired by the archive

To architect our asset management system, we drew inspiration from the archive itself. The organization strategy in the physical archive is loosely similar to the Dewey decimal system, where an index references the location of photos associated with a subject.

The archive contains well over 700,000 index cards that are alphabetically sorted by subject from A. Cappella Chapel Choir to ZZ Top. Each index card contains the location of the folder in which the corresponding collection of photos can be found. Occasionally, a subject is divided into subtopics with multiple references to different folders.

As an example, an index card about Amelia Earhart is further broken down into multiple subtopics, such as portraits, individual snapshots and European receptions.

An index card indicating where to find photos of Amelia Earhart.

If we were to be interested in European Receptions, we would find the folder labeled “4794-L-8.”

Some folder covers may contain additional text that provides a high-level description about the collection of photos found within the folder; this text is especially useful when it’s the only text associated with a photo.

The front cover of a folder containing photos of Amelia Earhart.

The backs of individual photos usually contain contextual data, such as stamps of publication dates and folder names, handwritten notes, crop marks and taped news clippings indicating publication.
['The Nyt Open Team']
['Systems Thinking', 'Code', 'Photography', 'Technology', 'Database']