iSculpt.org

Okay, a few posts back, I told you about the Photos and Prints collection of the Library of Congress, which has some really great reference and inspiration material. One thing you might notice, however, if you check it out is that a lot of pictures only have a thumbnail or low-resolution JPEG image available. However (and I hinted at this in my last post) in most cases, there is an uncompressed, full-resolution TIFF image of the scan available online if you know how to get to it. Now, in some cases, especially with images that were scanned a long time ago, the uncompressed file is no larger then the JPEG image. But in many cases, you can get a much higher resolution image using this trick.

Let's take an example: Muybridge's Human and Animal Locomotion plates. How about this one:

LOC doesn't allow direct-linking to the catalog pages, but it's Call Number LOT 3309, plate 62, or just do a search on "Muybridge" and it will come up. You can choose any of the Muybridge plates, it doesn't have to be this one. When you get to the catalog page, you're going to see a little tiny thumbnail, like the one above. Clicking it does not take you to a higher resolution version of the image, and there is no larger version available, according to the catalog page. Well, that's frustrating, isn't it?

But wait! Right click on the image an open it in a new window, or copy the image address (url) to the clipboard. You'll see a URL that looks like this:

http://memory.loc.gov/service/pnp/cph/3c10000/3c15000/3c15100/3c15103t.gif

Okay, now, the Library of Congress follows a very consistent naming standard for their digital assets. If you want to get to the highest resolution version of this image available, you need to make two changes to the url. First, change the word "service" to "master, and then change the last five letters from "t.gif" to "u.tif". So, your new URL will look like this:

http://memory.loc.gov/master/pnp/cph/3c10000/3c15000/3c15100/3c15103u.tif

Go ahead and give it a click, but be prepared to wait; these uncompressed tiff files can be large. But you'll be rewarded for your wait with a very large high-resolution copy of this image, suitable for printing. Pretty cool, huh? This works with ALMOST all of their scanned prints and photos. In a few cases, you don't have to change the word "service" to "master", but just change the last five characters.