Sources

Sharing Our Favorite Sources

I wanted to make sure there was a page on our website dedicated to sharing our favorite sources of historical photographs. While these aren’t all of our sources, we frequent them the most as they have some of the highest quality content. Enjoy!

Library of Congress

The Library of Congress is the largest library in the world, with millions of books, films and video, audio recordings, photographs, newspapers, maps and manuscripts in its collections. The Library is the main research arm of the U.S. Congress and the home of the U.S. Copyright Office.

Specifically, the Library of Congress hosts the Detroit Publishing Company Collection, which includes over 25,000 glass negative photos, including hundreds from right here in Pittsburgh. Most of their images are in the public domain, meaning they are free of any copyright restrictions. Not only does this collection contain some of the most iconic photos of Pittsburgh - most of the prints on this website are credited to it!

Historic Pittsburgh

Historic Pittsburgh is a collaborative efforts between multiple institutions in the Pittsburgh area and is comprised of hundreds of various collections. Their collections include a wide range of publications, maps, manuscripts, visual images, and audio-video materials.

Most of my earlier Vintage Pitt content was sourced from this website as it contains a ton of great collections featuring the University of Pittsburgh. My personal favorites include the Joel B. Levinson Collection, the Harold Corsini Collection, and the Herb Ferguson Collection.

Shorpy

Shorpy is a vintage photography site featuring thousands of high-definition images. The site is named after Shorpy Higginbotham, a teenage coal miner who lived 100 years ago. The contributors at Shorpy use high resolution downloads, mostly from the Library of Congress, and spend hours restoring and enhancing them. 

Note: Despite the original photos being in the public domain, because of their process, Shorpy does own the rights to their restored images. 

Pittsburgh City Photographer Collection

The Pittsburgh City Photographer Collection features images as commissioned by the Department of Public Works, Division of Photography, City of Pittsburgh for the years of 1901-1979. The collection, held by the Archives Service Center (ASC) at the University of Pittsburgh, comprises more than 150,000 film negatives, glass plate negatives, and photographic prints.

Retrographer

Retrographer is a crowdsourced website where users can tag the location of historic photos from various sources. Tagged photos are then matched up to the present-day Google street view of the photo. While it's not 100% accurate sometimes - this is one of the first sites I discovered and began exploring Pittsburgh's history with.

Other Sources

While about 90% of our photos are from the sources above, a few extra we've been using lately are: Pinterest (unpublished content), Wikimedia Commons (links to the original source; can be good to find unindexed content), and Pittsburgh Post-Gazette (their Digs collection is awesome). For videos, I honestly just spend a few hours searching YouTube for random hidden gems.

Editing Tools

I try to only post high quality photos and videos, but if a photo is blurry or has a low resolution, I use Remini to use AI tools to sharpen it. Similarly, I will use Adobe Lightroom to color grade and edit photos and CapCut to enhance and stabilize videos. My goal is to retain as much of the original source’s integrity while improving the quality of the content.