Pictures Victoria - Pictures Australia - Australia in Pictures

PictureVictoria is a Victorian Local History Project, funded from Arts Victoria, through the Statewide Public Library Development Grants. This project aims to increase the accessibility of the local history collections held by Victorian public libraries, in particular through the development of a digitisation strategy.

The primary focus of PictureVictoria is to provide a single portal for access to pictorial and photographic collections held in Victoria's public libraries. This site aims to complement existing portals, such as Picture Australia and the State Library of Victoria's Picture Collection.


Doncaster Templestowe Historical Society (DTHS) has added hundreds of photos from our collection to this catalogue with the cooperation of the Whitehorse Manningham Library.

Picture Victoria's limitation is that it only displays low quality thumbnails of pictures shared with it by historical societies such as ours. Internet users then have to contact the relevant historical society.


The system was conceived as part of a National Library of Australia (NLA) project "Picture Australia" but this project floundered.

Picture Australia has been absorbed into Trove and published on Flickr. It was originally launched in September 2000, and at that time, was a unique and ground breaking service, bringing together digitised images from cultural heritage collections around Australia for not only all Australians to see but also the world.

Contemporary images were sourced from Flickr via a series of Groups, which ensured individual contributions to Picture Australia were included in the snapshot of Australiana. We will continue with this tradition using the Trove: Australia in Pictures Group.


Pictures here are at high quality and downloadable at original resolution.
Picture Australia's publication of free access to 346 000 high resolution photos of Flickr is part of a worldwide trend to provide free full text and full quality imagery direct to the world.
If Flickr goes bust, the library is easily moved to another service. The metadata (information about the picture) is usually embedded inside the picture to make this process extremely simple.

It is confusing, but NLA also have another Flickr account:  Flickr: National Library of Australia.


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