Recovered source: https://www.flickr.com/photos/alfonsscholing/3812612486/

Recovered summary: Flickr image trace by Alfons Scholing with music/recording studio reference.

Suggested next step: replace this reconstruction with the original post body if you find a backup, web archive capture, exported XML, or media folder.

Recovered source: https://www.flickr.com/photos/168670674@N05/

Recovered summary: Flickr profile trace: Alfons Scholing / zomb13s, 794 photos, joined 2019.

Suggested next step: replace this reconstruction with the original post body if you find a backup, web archive capture, exported XML, or media folder.

I found five strong Flickr accounts/photostreams tied to Alfons Scholing, plus one “snofla” account that looks like a different Alfons, so I would not merge that one unless you confirm it is yours.

So the safe Alfons Scholing Flickr archive map is:

Alfons Scholing 2006 → ik ben Fons / fons-the-eye-sticker 2011 → zomb13s 2019 → alfonsscholing 2022 → ikziezombies / 1337 2026.

Combined photo count for the five strong matches: 7,294 listed Flickr photos.
Including the uncertain snofla account would make it 7,599, but I’d keep that separate for now.

In this post in a series on the anniversaries of the Declaration of Independence (250^th) and the Biodiversity Library (20^th), I want to investigate the thousands of images stored in BHL, most in published books.  In its early days, users had to hunt through the texts to find illustrations, though in the accompanying list of pages, those with illustrations were marked, especially if pages were solely text or illustration.  However, there was no way to search just for bird images, or more importantly for me, plants.  Within a few years and with the help of grant funds, BHL launched a citizen science initiative to upload images to Flickr and then have volunteers tag them with information on the artist, the subject, and where published.  This led to two Flickr sites, one with tagged images, organized into albums with all the images from particular volumes by topic, as well as a larger site with all BHL images, including those that had yet to be tagged.  Not only books were included but also illustrated periodicals, such as 19^th-century publications like Science-Gossip.  Eventually the albums were organized by subject area and also by the institution that contributed the volume; this landing page is eye-opening because it gives the number of volumes each library contributed.  Not surprisingly, the Smithsonian has the most, at almost a thousand. 

This brings me back to this series’ theme, the link between the two anniversaries, both involving advancement of the common good.  Since beginning my interest in herbaria and investigating their history, I’ve learned a great deal about the history of the United States as well, and BHL has played a major role in this.  I was able to examine the first book written by an American on American plants, Humphry Marshall’s 1785 Arbustum Americanum: The American Grove and the first botanical textbook published in the United States, Benjamin Barton’s 1803 Elements of Botany.  All the great books produced by the naturalists who explored the country and wrote about its natural history are in BHL.  There is something rewarding about reading the text in its original format; the old printing styles provide a reminder of the context in which these books were written.  Some works, like François Michaux’s The North American Sylva, have beautifully colored engravings of illustrations painted by the great French artist Pierre-Joseph Redouté.  However, since such volumes were expensive, black and white illustrations, often lithographs, became much more common. 

I just rediscovered a book I read years ago, when I was more catholic in my tastes before my botanical mania began.  It’s Ann Selby Blum’s 1993 Picturing Nature: American Nineteenth-Century Zoological Illustration, an amazing study that would have been much easier to research if BHL were available to her.  She notes how early zoological images, like those of Mark Catesby and John James Audubon depicted animals in an environmental context.  As books became more “scientific,” animals began to appear against a plain white background to focus attention on specific characteristics.  As time went on and the number of species grew, it was more common to place several species on one page to save space and to allow comparison of differences. 

The same trends obviously occurred in botany, but I would argue that they began earlier and were hardly unique to this country.  Early printed herbals, like many of their manuscript predecessors, often depicted organisms set on a blank background.  As to multiples on a page, right away James Petiver’s 18^th-century publications come to mind.  They picture plants he had received from his many correspondents in America and other parts of the world with several plants crowded on a page.  The visual was important, but space was at a premium in works that could be published relatively rapidly.   

With Carl Linnaeus’s classification system, which centered attention on the flower and particularly on the male and female organs, there was a trend toward only picturing a plant’s flower or even just its reproductive parts as in the famous Georg Ehret illustration of the differences in Linnaeus’s 24 plant classes.  Similar illustrations were done for zoology texts with anatomical parts organized to be read as a series, from left to right and from top row to bottom.  Blum also noted that lithography gave way to line drawings done in black and white.  These were more economical to produce, and that trend is also obvious in botanical illustration where it is the dominant form down to the present day.  Again however, it harkens back to earlier botanical illustrations where a drawing of an entire plant might be accompanied by smaller drawings of plant parts, often enlarged, and often including the sex organs.  Thanks to BHL, checking all this out is easy, especially using the Flickr albums.

It’s not surprising that artists use these images frequently and in many different ways.  Botanical artists access them for ideas on composition and for double checking structure and form.  Other artists use them for inspiration and even as the basis for their own work.  Since all these images are copyright free, with most in the public domain, they can serve as the basis for new work, such as that of artist Dee Etzwiler.  Her fascinating art was the subject of a BHL blog post a few years ago.  I have to admit that I used William Henry Harvey’s seaweed illustrations for an embroidered and quilted wall handing I did.  That’s the wonderful thing about BHL, anyone can use it.

Reference

Blum, A. S. (1993). Picturing Nature: American Nineteenth-Century Zoological Illustration. Princeton University Press.

This spring, I started tracking the growth of the apple trees in our garden. I started late, but as we know, it’s never too late! I post daily updates on Flickr. We have three trees, so three albums: one for each tree.

Apple Tree #1

Apple Tree #2

Apple Tree #3

LOOK AT ALL THE PICS + VIDEO- XOXO RT

COME ALL AND JOIN IN ON THE CELEBRATION IN GRATITUDE, GRATEFUL, KIND AND LOYALTY TO OUR #1 PRINCESS ON HER BIRTHDAY!! TOP 10’S MUST PARTICIPATE TO KEEP THEIR STANDING!!!!

As much as I prefer to shoot film, like pretty much everyone else, I use my cell phone camera for unartistic, basic documentation or when a film camera is not possible to use.

Unlike film photography, my cell phone photography is not very tightly curated. So despite their small file size, over time, it’s easy to accumulate a large digital footprint consisting of everything from family photos to parking space numbers.

It’s good to make a habit of regularly deleting duplicates and photos you took for temporary purposes. But for everything you’d like to hold onto, what is the solution?

Below I’m going to share information on apps that conveniently copy the photo files from your phone to cloud storage plans for redundancy and safe keeping.

iCloud, Samsung Cloud and Google Photos (Limited Storage, Tiered Cost)

I am an iPhone user but every major smart phone maker tethers our devices to a default cloud storage solution, and to my knowledge, they are charged similarly. There’s Samsung Cloud for Samsung devices and Google Photos for Google devices. This go-to mechanism is your first line of defense against losing your images. But it may also be the most costly.

The basic architecture is that your phone has hard storage built into it and this is where your newest photos and videos go. Once signed up, this local phone storage is automatically backed up on your devices default cloud storage, iCloud Photos in the case of iPhone users. But when you run out of space on this local storage, the remaining images are stored only on your cloud plan.

The catch is that you have to pay more as you use more space. For Apple’s iCloud Photos, you start out free for just 50 gigs, then $2.99 a month for 500 gigs, then $9.99 a month for 2 tb and it just goes up and up. Samsung Cloud and Google Photos are very similar.

Whichever device/default cloud photo storage you use, this archive of your cell phone images is happening automatically without additional apps installed. This makes things pretty seamless which is why most consumers probably stop here.

You should know that iPhones are not compatible with Samsung Cloud and Samsung Galaxies are not compatible with iCloud Photos. However, Google Photos can be used on every smart phone I checked.

But if you want to migrate your photos to reduce subscription costs, or back them up for safe keeping in the event of a catastrophe such as loss of access to your default cloud account, I have two more recommendations.

Flickr Pro (Unlimited Storage, $148 per 2 years)

Something that many people probably aren’t aware of is that your dusty old Flickr account can be used to back up your cell phone photos and video. And, if you have a Flickr Pro account, this includes unlimited photos and videos.

Honestly, if you only use a free Flickr account, the 1000 photo limit will probably not be very useful for the purposes of a smart phone back up. So I recommend a Pro account not only for your cell phone photos but also to back up all of your finalized film/digital artistic photos too. Flickr Pro is a cheaper image storage solution to something like Backblaze with the main limitation being less file format compatibility and a video length limit of 10 minutes. But the benefits are image hosting and of course use of the site’s non-Zuckerberg/Musk social media features.

I have my iPhone set up to sync with a private album on my Flickr Pro page. My followers can see my film photos but not my iPhone slop.

I like Flickr‘s legacy viewing, editing and retrieval interface which is very basic and easy to navigate. Flickr has lots of great batch tools that allow you to tag and organize and even add copyright information to images once they are uploaded And unlike Apple, Google, Microsoft, and Amazon, there is no AI interaction with your photos on Flickr. Oh, and you get 5% off from KEH.com with your Flickr Pro account!

Flickr is a legacy online image service though and it does have its downsides. The site can run slow at times. Some may find the interface out of date. Worse, there is no end-to-end data encryption or two factor authentication.

All that being said, I think Flickr offers useful and unique features for a competitive price.

Amazon Photos (Unlimited Storage, “Free” with Prime)

A much more widespread and current photo storage solution is Amazon Photos. Amazon Photos offers unlimited storage like Flickr but it comes at no additional charge with every Amazon Prime account. So if you’re there for the free shipping, you may as well be backing up your photos here too.

I have an Amazon Prime account that I used to turn on and off in order to get occasional deals on shipping products purchased from Amazon. But I’ve slowly, if not regrettably been sucked into the Amazon ecosystem of Prime streaming video and music. I just try to find all the little perks that I can use to justify my deal with the Devil. For example, a Prime membership even gets you $0.10 to $0.20 off gasoline.

I get it if you view Amazon as the real-world equivalent of Wall-E’s Buy-n-Large and you don’t want Jeff Bezos to have your photos. But if you can hold your nose and press the button, Amazon Photos does offer the security and privacy that Flickr does not and that Apple charges quite a bit for. With Amazon Photos, you can also turn off AI scans of your images.

Flickr and Amazon Photos exist as a phone app, a webpage and also a desktop app. While I haven’t explored them yet, these other iterations can be used to back up your film photo files directly from your computer too.

The only downside I’ve noticed to Amazon Photos is that total video space is allotted to just 5gb without a paid upgrade.

iCloud Photos, Samsung Cloud and Google Photos can be operated from phone and desktop apps as well as a webpage too. And they also offer the same high quality security and privacy. But the advantage I see to Amazon Photos is that is bundled with shopping and streaming.

Conclusion

For some of you, this might have been elementary, but personally, I only stumbled into some of these options fairly recently. I imagine others were unaware of this use for accounts they already had too. May as well put these serviced to their full use and keep our photos safe. I’d love to hear from anyone who uses these easier/more affordable forms of photo backup for their “real”, non-cell phone photos too. That will be my next step with Amazon Photos.

Drop any related tips you have in the comments!

Thanks for reading and happy archiving!

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Johnny Martyr 

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This is my submission on the last day of the Spring Polaroid Week. It’s super inspiring to see the photos of others in the group!

If you’ve also participated, do share your ‘Roid photos, too, in the comment section below.🖤

Many times in life, I have either lost contact with people and things that have meant a great deal to me. Some have resurfaced, a few years later; others, have returned to my circle after a few decades and some are still out there somewhere. In every case, those losses have been because I have been needed by those closest to me. The old adage, “If you love something, let it go……”, keeps coming back on replay; and that’s okay. My life of travel and community service has been set aside for the benefit of a very bright, rambunctious and captivating little girl-and I would do this a thousand times over. There is no telling how much she is going to mean to the world, but I sense it will be a great deal.

Some of what I have given up will be brought back into my life, especially if it will benefit Hana. I look forward to all of that, and to much else that I can only imagine at this point. My sense of worth and of accomplishment are what have most strongly been recaptured.