Just in time for Saint Patrick’s Day! Independent.ie had a story yesterday morning about an expanded archive from the National Library of Ireland. This site contains 34,000 photographs of Ireland covering 1860 to 1954, and is available at http://digital.nli.ie/cdm4/index_glassplates.php?CISOROOT=/glassplates.

That URL is actually a pointer to several different archives, from the Clarke Collection (“76 images, showing Dubliners in their city between 1897 and 1904,”) to the Lawrence Royal & Cabinet Collections (“19,331 images from a collection of commercially produced photographs taken between 1870 and 1914, showing topographical scenes throughout Ireland,”) to the Tempest Collection (“41 images, showing scenes from county Louth in the early part of the twentieth century.”)

Pick a collection and and you’ll get a gallery-type set of thumbnails with brief descriptions. Click a thumbnail and you’ll get a much larger version of the picture along with a few more details, including date, source, and rights.

I enjoyed exploring all the available images, especially as some of them are pretty weird. Occasionally I did wish for even larger images than what was available, but as these were photographs I had a bit of luck downloading them to my own computer, opening them in my graphics editor, and zooming in on them that way. A fun site to visit. Please note, though, that today being what it is, you might find that the site loads a bit slowly.