We recently came across two WW1 photos dated November 1918 showing groups of military personnel at Versaille and Parc du Saint Cloud in Paris. Presumably taken by a local photographer to record service personnel out and about to celebrate the wars end. I've posted them as they show a fascinating mix of uniforms. Is anyone up for trying to identify the corps and nationalities? I think I can identify Royal Artillery, Machine Gun Corps but there are many more. Unfortunately struggling to upload the files!
Hi Tom I'm stuck, getting error 500. They are less than 10MB and jpg format but have been through Photoshop rather straight from a camera. Having said that I cant see any particular setting when they were saved down to a usable resolution that might have caused this. Thoughts anyone? Sorry about this. Tried using Firefox as well as 'converting' from one jpg to another jpg via the image utilities in a major CAD package, still no luck.
FWIW, I recently noticed a file (can't remember which type now) inexplicably grow when I uploaded it so maybe something like that is thwarting you. I hope Owen's offer works for us but would point out that 10MB is also the most you can reasonably attach to an e-mail message, if you want to be sure of it getting through, as many e-mail nodes can't cope with more - hence the advent of cloud sharing for the big stuff. If not, presuming they're B&W photos and though it may not help much now you've already dropped to JPG's lossy compression, have you tried simply changing the 'colour depth' to (8-bit) greyscale ? And/or try zip-archiving to squeeze them down under the limit ... or even, as a last resort, create a split archive set to upload/e-mail in instalments. What dimensions are they anyway ? FTR my biggest photo file, of a professional 13½"x7½" formal 140-strong company sitting, is an archive-quality 36 megapixel 600dpi greyscale scan weighing in at 14.2MB in PNG format - but dropping to 4.45MB, when saved as JPG from Paint Shop Pro 5, with hardly any loss of quality when viewed on a monitor screen ... so merely compromising compression fidelity at full resolution. I'm curious to see if my cousin Harry (then an RASC clerk at Versailles) is included ... Steve
Hi Steve I've just emailed them as per Owen's offer so if that works we're sorted! The original scan at 2400dpi colour gave files of about 70mb so I've tried to edit them down to just below 10MB using a variety of techniques (including those you've kindly suggested) in PS but none resulted in a file that would upload. I tried using a CAD graphics package like Microstation (which has a very good raster image handling and transformation capabilities) to simply import and resave the images but that failed as well. If Owens offer still fails, I'll keep trying as the content and detail in these photos should be worth the effort.
Oh well that didnt work. Downloaded 1 image. It won't open at all on my PC to allow me to resize it. I give up. Back to you.
AHHHHH! Thanks for trying. Surprised it would not even open. Might email to my work account and see if it's a problem there. I' ll try some more options at the weekend and see if I can get something to work. Graham
Reality check: According to my researches into digital preservation, 600dpi is widely professionally regarded as archive quality for normal material. Anything much more, and then only if genuine (i.e. not interpolated), is generally aimed at acceptably recovering images from film - typically 35mm or smaller stock. So ... to come in ~9MB all told for the pair, you need only rescale your 2400dpi originals to 25% to yield roughly 70/16=4.375MB 600dpi results very like my aforesaid 4.45MB example - sample of which on right of PNG/JPG comparison below:
Nudged by Owen, here you go, mate. Resized to 300ppi with the magic of Photoshop, which should preserve plenty of detail (I hope! Do say if not). Really nice shots indeed: Versailles: Parc du Saint Cloud:
good day hutt,m,yesterday.09:16pm.re:fascinating group photos.some very interesting photos,with much help from fellow members,regards bernard85
Having seen Adam's results, Graham, I agree they're nice but have also been reflecting on them to wonder what stumped you. Here's the math: * An uncompressed 70MB 24-bit colour image directly translates to 70/3=23.3 megapixels * Its uncompressed 8-bit greyscale 600dpi equivalent comes to only 23.3/16=1½ megapixels * Even PNG should have no difficulty losslessly squeezing the latter down to well under 1MB So maybe kick off with more appropriate settings next time ? NB: Just to fully illustrate what may be crammed into 4½MB by such choices, I tried directly uploading my whole 36 megapixel JPG example (twice to eliminate the possibility of an error) only for the system to completely undermine its detail by drastic downscaling ... ... but there's more than one way to skin kitty ( View attachment 1944-10 - photo - Home Guard, 4th Middx Battalion, F Coy.zip ) for anyone interested in such trivia ! Moving on, though, could you please elaborate on what background info you have on these shots or have you already exhausted their known provenance ? I note, for instance, the prominence of diggers in the Versailles group (maybe hinting at a delegation) and regret the depth of field impairing identification of the background figures in the Parc de Saint-Cloud crowd. Re my cousin Harry, the forage-capped soldier wearing a greatcoat in both photos may well be him but I may just be kidding myself as mainly going by facial resemblence to his brother's family (as here ... ! wrong ! ! wrong !... excluding the living), his service record (voluntarily stripeless 30yo from Feb-Dec '18) and a psychological sketch from his niece so please bear with me until I can run this by her. I'll meanwhile PM you about improving my chances of a +ve ID if that's OK by you. Steve PS: My RASC Harry candidate now debunked as RFC but if his niece can turn up a photo of him ... PPS: I've just spoken to Harry's niece who never saw him first-hand and knows of no photo
I've just unloaded a small cropped area of one of the pictures at the full scanned resolution and its worked. I'll cut the photos into smaller areas and post over the weekend.
