Here’s a terrific search hack for the Internet Archive Book Images Flickr photo stream

Way back in 2014 we shared the news that the Internet Archive Book Images account was up and running on Flickr, thanks to the hard work of Kalev Leetaru who was, at the time, a Yahoo research fellow at Georgetown University. When the Book Images archive first went online, it consisted of 2.6 million of the over 14 million images that Leetaru had extracted from roughly two million Internet Archive public domain eBooks. Those books spanned over 500 years, making this a truly impressive archive indeed.

Internet Archive provides more detail on the images and the archive:

Each image includes detailed descriptions, including the subject tags of the book it came from and the text immediately surrounding it on the page. The latter is especially powerful, as it allows to keyword search 500 years of images, instantly accessing particular topics or themes. . . Perhaps what is most remarkable about this collection is that these images come not from some newly-unearthed archive being seen for the first time, but rather from the books that we have been digitizing for years that have been resting in our digital libraries. Through the power of big data we are suddenly able to view the world’s books not as merely piles of text, but as individualized galleries of one of the richest and most diverse museums of imagery in the world.

When they introduced the images at its launch, Internet Archive shared some fun ways to use it:

Trying typing in the word “telephone’ and enjoy what images appear? Curious about how death has been characterized over 500 years of images – type in “mordis”. Feeling good about health care – type in medicine and prepare to be amazed. Remember, all of these images are in the public domain!

Back in 2014 Cory Doctorow called the archive “just wonderful” and exclaimed about the richly annotated, free-to-use images, “What more could you ask for?” Well, how about being able to access even more images? The current count is 5,313,756!

I’m glad to report that Archive is up and running, after a brief hiatus. However, it seems to be suffering from technical difficulties that make it hard to search for specific topics. Luckily, some kind Redditors are here to help us out. One Redditor named “OutsideDangerous3143” shared a terrific tip on how to search the Internet Archive Book Images photo stream:

I found a work around for the broken search on the Flickr Internet Archive photo stream. For example, to search for pictures of dogs there, don’t even open Flickr. Just type the following URL directly into your search engine:

“dog” site:https://www.flickr.com/photos/internetarchivebookimages/

For the search results, toggle to “images” (as opposed to “all”), and the images pop up. This approach is actually much faster returning results than was the search option in Flickr when it worked with the Internet Archive image collection.

It works super well! I tried it on a few terms that have been on my mind lately – Andes, ship, plague, quarantine, rat, and vaccine – and each search returned some incredibly interesting images. Try it out and see for yourself!

Access the Internet Archive Book Images photo stream on Flickr here. You can use the images for research projects, graphic design inspiration, or just for plain ol’ fun and learning! And read more about various ways to use the archive on this Reddit post.