The city of Edmonton, capital of the Canadian province of Alberta, now has more than 25,000 historic photos available on its city Web site. The direct URL is https://archivesphotos.edmonton.ca/Presto/Default.aspx.

To get a sense of what’s here you can check out the top 200 most requested photos. There are some weird ones in this collection, including “Woman Demonstrating Oven Capacity” (um, what?) and “Sad Santa”. Pictures have slightly larger versions and a few details like year taken, but not a lot.

If you don’t like the top 200 photos you can also search by keyword. You can browse too if you like, but since all the images are in the “uncategorized” collection, browsing won’t do you much good. A search for “train” found me over 170 images, including some really nice shots of locomotives from the early 20th century. Be sure to keep your searches general; “train” found me that many images but “locomotive” found me only two, and I know there were more.

I like how eclectic and wide-ranging this collection is. If you like any of the prints here you can order them for $20 each except for the panoramas. They have a different price structure.