Where do you Find your Images?
What we offer is a mix of scans from our own collections of images scanned from Antique Books, Postcards, Ephemera etc, and images that come from very carefully vetted sources, as well as some newly created pictures. We purchase a lot from Europe, and of course the U.S. as well. Occasionally we do haul videos on YouTube, showing some of our finds, be sure and check them out, if you are interested.
All images that we offer go through an assessment and improvement process. They are cleaned up (sometimes a lot!) and altered as needed. We may change the color, remove stains, repair rips or damage, remove portions of an image, change the size, sharpen, and in some cases drastically alter the image to fit our theme, or just make it generally more usable. We then painstakingly remove the background areas, so that you have a transparent image to work with, and the work is already done for you. This entire process takes hours and hours of work!
Here are a few photos of our archives, where we keep our Ephemera. Each of the books in the photos are loaded with illustrations, as well as all of the file drawers and multiple large postcard binders. They are all chock full of inventory!
A Peek Into Our Archives
You can find info about us and our team HERE.
Artist Created Pictures
We have a number of bundles from years past that include newly created pictures that were hand drawn, or hand painted, by artists friends of ours. You can still find these bundles on the site but you have to go back a bit to see them. This was one way that we could bring some interesting pictures on various topics that we were not able to find, or never existed, in the past. We stopped doing these a few years ago as we found out, via surveys, that these were not particularly popular with most of our members. Many felt that they did not have the vintage appeal that they were looking for.
Machine Generated Pictures
We have started offering some machine generated pictures (AI) in some of our bundles. We pay for the pro version of the tool that we use, which allows commercial use. We are using this tool in a responsible manner. We never use any artists names that are currently living. The artist's names that we use in our prompts are of those who's work is already in the Public Domain. Also most of the time we use dates from around the 1700's to early 1900's. We are excited about the possibility of being able to offer unique images to our members in various themes that we would not be able to otherwise offer. This includes beautiful illustrations of more diverse people which are extremally difficult to find in resources produced prior to 1928 (the time period that falls into the public domain). These types of images have been repeatedly requested by our members and we are so pleased that now we can finally offer some.
Keep in mind that for the machine generated pictures, you may not be able to get a copyright license from the U.S. government for projects using these images that you would want to publish. So for example if you are writing a novel that you want to publish, it would be best not to use these pictures to illustrate your book.
We have set up a way for you to find these images, if you would prefer not to use them in your projects.
Here's how to find these Pictures on the site:
Step 1: Click on "Images" at the top of the site.
Step 2: Along the left sidebar, scroll down until you see the "Styles" filter. Click on the "See More" at the end of the category options to populate the drop down. Then select "Vintage Style AI". This will then populate all of the machine generated images on the site.