Jonathan Jones on why we can’t stop Retronauting (sharing old photographs):

What is nostalgia? For me it’s triggered by the sense that my parents might be young people in Butterfield’s deep colour vistas of the West End of London. For enthusiasts who post historic photographs on Twitter, it’s more broadly scattered. These pictures reveal the wealth of photographic documents, memories and arcana that these sites have dragged into the 21st-century limelight, from an 1890s portrait of Cornelia Sorabji, India’s first female advocate and the first woman to study law at Oxford University, to the building of the Hoover dam in Roosevelt’s America.
I won’t lie, I love old photographs—and old illustrations, old typography, old car manuals, and kitschy ads in the back of early 20th century magazines. I’ve been in orbit retronauting for many years now.
The idea for Daily Exhaust and The Combustion Chamber came from a 1950’s booklet on cars from my father.
In other news, Getty added another 77,000 images to it’s open content archive and the National Library of Ireland added 10,000 images to their online archive.