A few years ago I made a blog post, The Neigh­bor­hood Then and Now com­par­ing his­toric images of Port­land street scenes with sim­i­lar modern-day images.  In that post, I linked to my source, Efiles.  Efiles is a City of Port­land web­site with a data­base of his­toric records — pho­tos, doc­u­ments, record­ings, maps, and other things — and a search engine for retriev­ing these doc­u­ments.  I remem­bered it being dif­fi­cult to query, at best.  At the time I made that blog post, I found the magic incan­ta­tions to locate pho­tos, but those were quickly forgotten.

Today, at a com­mit­tee meet­ing for the neigh­bor­hood asso­ci­a­tion web­site, the sub­ject of those his­toric pho­tos came up.  I had the link, but even after 10–15 min­utes of play­ing around with the query engine, I was unable to find pic­tures that I KNEW were there (because I had pre­vi­ously found and used them).

I am happy to say that I just now (re-)figured out how to locate pic­tures, so I am post­ing the pro­ce­dure here — partly so I do not have to re-re-figure out how to do this again in the future and partly so that oth­ers may be able to do their own easy his­toric photo searches.

First, you go to the search form at http://efiles.ci.portland.or.us/.  The most impor­tant thing about this form is to select a search type row of “Clas­si­fi­ca­tion Word” and value of “Pho­tographs”.  You’ll want to keep the default search type of “And” (not “Or”), then fill in what­ever else you’d like.  For me, it was “Title Word”.

This will, hope­fully, return a good num­ber of results.  Most of them will be pho­tos, but some will not.  Hope­fully, a lot of them are already scanned and online, but there’s the pos­si­bil­ity that a pic­ture you are look­ing for can only be found in a dusty card­board box in an office some­where.  Use the leg­end at left o see what is in your results.  The light and dark gray “page” icon means that this archive item deals with a pho­to­graph.  If you also get the page-with-magnifying-glass, you’re in luck — the photo is online.  
The result­ing down­load is a PDF file con­tain­ing a TIFF image.  It is left as an exer­cise to the reader as to how to con­vert this to some­thing a lit­tle more usable.  For me, that is open­ing it in Mac OS X’s Pre­view appli­ca­tion, then sav­ing it as some­thing else.

If you liked this post, you may also enjoy:

1. Hello From Bel­ly­dance Thinger
2. SPOCK ROCK!
3. His­toric Pho­tos of Portland
4. Saint Cup­cake on Belmont
5. Test Phone Post

Tagged as: archives, auditor, auditorsoffice, city, efiles, foster, fosterpowell, historic, howto, powell