Floods at Llanrwst, January 1965 after a dam on an old lead mine reservoir burst

Geoff Charles was a photojournalist who worked for over 50 years capturing images of Wales with his camera. From the 1930s onwards he worked extensively in north and mid Wales for newspapers such as The Wrexham Star, The Montgomeryshire Express and Y Cymro. On his retirement in 1975 he gave his collection of about 120,000 negatives to The National Library of Wales. The work of digitising this enormous collection began in 2000, and at present just over 30,000 of his images of Wales in the 1940s, 1950s and 1960s are available on the National Library's website.

We at GetArchive are exploring new methods of image metadata augmentation and verification. Our goal is to make it possible to find images on any topic. In particular, we are trying to verify and fix historic periodization. This collection is made of historic photographs of automobiles that look as if they were taken in the 1940s. The collection is made with aid of a neural image recognition network dealing with the whole image composition rather than with the car model - some cars may be dated incorrectly. Although, while this method is surprisingly good for the purpose of dating and tagging, a certain percentage of images (less than 8%) may not represent automobile, but other vehicle type or visually similar object. Naturally, our next step should be creating numerous datasets for a particular car years&models, but as of September 2022, we found no use to justify the effort.