Stolen Volkswagen Beetle - Automobiles of 1940s

This exhibition of photographs from The National Archives was produced in 2000 as part of a larger exhibition put together by partners in the Safeguarding European Photographic Images for Access (SEPIA) project. Institutions from across Europe provided images from their own holdings showing transport of all kinds across the Continent. The collection shows the technical development; the marvels of design and construction that improvements in transport spawned. Transport has fundamentally altered the world in which we live and these images cover everything from horsepower to airpower.

We at GetArchive are exploring new methods of image metadata augmentation and verification. Our goal is to make it possible to find images on any topic. In particular, we are trying to verify and fix historic periodization. This collection is made of historic photographs of automobiles that look as if they were taken in the 1940s. The collection is made with aid of a neural image recognition network dealing with the whole image composition rather than with the car model - some cars may be dated incorrectly. Although, while this method is surprisingly good for the purpose of dating and tagging, a certain percentage of images (less than 8%) may not represent automobile, but other vehicle type or visually similar object. Naturally, our next step should be creating numerous datasets for a particular car years&models, but as of September 2022, we found no use to justify the effort.