The Library of Congress website is a great place to find historic images to use in presentations. The free images housed by the Library of Congress are organized into many collections. One of those collections, Photochrom Prints, was recently featured in a LOC blog post.

The Photochrom Prints collection offers 6,500 vintage travel photographs of places in Europe, North America, and the Middle East. The collection is organized according to location. Click a location name in the list and you will be taken to a collection of photographs of that location. Every image is available to download and re-use for free.

Applications for Education
The images in the PhotoChrom Prints collection could be used in placemarks on Google Maps or Google Earth to show a comparison of the current view and past view of landmarks. In fact, we’ll be doing that in To Geography & Beyond With Google Earth & Maps.

The LOC blog post about PhotoChrom included a couple of comments from readers who had suggestions about using the images in their classrooms. Bridget Morton wrote, “These would be great for Creative Writing classes in developing setting for pieces of fiction.” And Catherine Horan wrote, “Will be posting these on a bulletin board in the library to expose my students to the amazing places captured in the photos and to show them the great things available from the Library of Congress.”