Get Old Images of Scotland for Nothing

Do you want to see what Scotland used to look like ?
Do you need a picture for your website or publication ?

2 weeks before last Christmas, the British Library announced that they had put on Flickr over a million scanned images from books originally published in the 17th, 18th and 19th centuries for anyone to use, remix and repurpose.

At the time I couldn't see a particular use for them especially as they weren't sorted or arranged into subject collections, so it would be very difficult to find a particular picture.

If you know the title of a book, you can search for that but that doesn't help to find a specific picture.

Old Scottish Genealogy & Family History have created an interactive map that links images to a map of Scotland.

It's simple to use.

You pan the map to see the area in which you're interested and if there are images available, you'll see either a blue pin with a number or a red pin.
If it's a blue pin that means there's more than one image so you need to zoom in to see the individual red map pins.
Click on a red map pin to see one or more images, then click on the image to expand it.

Although there are more than 200 pins for Scotland, there are only 19 pins for the Scottish Borders but it's a start and a week ago there were only 15.

The red map pin near Melrose shows lots of views of Melrose Abbey; here's one: