World's Oldest Photography Museum Wants to Tag 400,000 Photos

In an effort to quickly organize over 400,000 of the world’s oldest photographs, the George Eastman House has turned to crowdsourcing, with the help of Clickworker and their global crowd.

The world’s oldest photography museum, George Eastman House International Museum of Photography and Film, is requesting the help of the general public to tag and catalog photos from their iconic collection. To meet the needs of tagging nearly half a million photos, George Eastman House is leveraging Clickworker’s crowd of over 115,000 crowdworkers, and is encouraging you to get involved as well.

Our partnership with Clickworker enables us to make our photographs searchable and ultimately make our collections more accessible to the world. Clickworker not only provides professional insight into the subject matter of our images, but also the option of crowdsourcing in several languages, which is ideal for our internationally focused collections.
Dr. Anthony Bannon, the Ron and Donna Fielding Director at George Eastman House

By crowdsourcing the simple tasks of tagging and cataloging each photo, the museum will be able to greatly reduce the time needed to organize each photo and make it available to the public – in many instances for the first time.

Among the collection are photos of Lincoln’s assassination conspirators, Marilyn Monroe, original daguerreotypes from 19th century America, and the evolution of the Empire State Building. The collection spans the work of 9,000 photographers including such unique artist collections as Southworth & Hawes, Lewis Hine, and Edward Steichen.

To help catalog and tag this prestigious collection, visit Clickworker.com, or visit George Eastman House to learn more.