Commons:Wilhelm Walther image donation/en
(please feel free to improve this translation!)
Image donation from Wilhelm Walther[edit]
Wilhelm Walther, a German, took his photos with a Leica in the early and mid-30s up to the 40s. The regional focus is Thuringia/Saale valley and Weimar; other regions include the Allgäu, Nuremberg, a tour along the Rhine/Main rivers (Frankfurt – Ruhr area) and Hamburg. All in all, we can see a vivid everyday picture of Germany in the 30s: Fashion, Traffic, Buildings, street photographs, uniforms, children.
Wilhelm Walther died in 1983. His son, who lives in the Netherlands, wrote to the support team last year and offered the two albums with more than 2000 negatives. We (User:Raymond and User:Elya) visited him at home and received the albums and – via a one-day interview – several annotations.
With financial support from Wikimedia Deutschland, the negatives were scanned in hi-res and finally uploaded.
Help with categorization wanted![edit]
Your help is needed! There are several motifs that allow an identificaton by time or location. To keep context, we have tried to add the previous and next image of the negative strip to each image description, hopefully successfully.
Fortunately, the donor had already scanned a lot of the negatives himself, to create photo books to leave to his children, and he had annotated these to the best of his knowledge. We went through these scans with him and took some more notes from the interview. We added these annotations as "tags" in the image descriptions. Please note: these tags are associated with groups of photos from one or two negative strips, so while they give a hint they do not precisely fit each photo.
There are some abbreviations in the image names: "WW" is Wilhelm Walther, the photographer, who appears on some photos – selfies or he gave is camera for a moment to another person. "EF" and later "EW" is his wife. The wedding, of which there are photos, was in 1935. From the wedding photos, one can get a rough date estimate: before or after 1935. "OD" is a friend of the photographer. The construction images of the Saale barrage and dam are mostly taken on outings of the Thüringenwerk, a then-large electricity company, hence the focus on this construction site.
Other photos allow chronological ranging, e.g. the Stresemann monument was destroyed in 1935, there is a known newspaper title of the Stürmer of 5th of September 1935. Etc. etc. – you will find many more hints!
During the upload, the images were roughly pre-categorized regionally, subject to errors.
Rename images[edit]
It might make sense to rename the images after identification. Please keep the prefix "Wilhelm Walther", the strip numbers and the ID. The prefix allows searching with the search widget below and preserves the functionality of the Javascript snipped below.
Coordination and talk[edit]
Please use the talk page for further coordination, if necessary.
Technical stuff[edit]
- We dusted off and revived our good old SternthalerBot for the upload job
- With the help of Pattypan and a main Excel file the images were uploaded.
- All images are (and should keep) in the root category Category:Digitization of the image stock of Wilhelm Walther and – as far as possible – in a regional category.
- All images where scanned as hi-res TIFF files, which allows for lossless restoration and other creative ideas.
Javascript snippet for commons.js[edit]
It might be annoying when you click on the image on its file page because MediaWiki will open or download the TIFF image. The following snippet, added to your personal common.js, changes the hyperlink to the largest available JPG:
var pagename = mw.config.get( 'wgPageName' );
if ( pagename.indexOf("File:Wilhelm_Walther") != -1 ) {
var jpgUrl = jQuery('.mw-thumbnail-link:last-child').attr('href');
jQuery('#file').find('a').attr('href', jpgUrl);
}