Good question. First of all, the images have all had their brightness and contrast adjusted. Sepia tone and gold tone prints have been converted to black-and-white before adjustment. For many of the images, I have digitally repaired cracks, tears, stains, etc. While the National Archives makes available free JPEGs from their collection, I have the uncompressed TIFFs used to create the JPEGs. In many cases, I have found the left and right halves of stereo images in different collections, and combined them to produce a stereo image not in other collections. And finally, I have spent nearly two decades collecting and cataloging these images, I continue to do so on a daily basis, I have priced the images very reasonably, it costs money to maintain the website, and I hope you will help me continue this work by making a purchase.

Some photographers, like Fowx, also appear as subjects in one or more photographs. When he is the subject of a photo, he is listed as “Fowx, Egbert G.” When he is the photographer of an image, he is listed as “by Fowx, Egbert G.”

All stereo images have been formatted so that they can be enjoyed as is using a stereo viewer. To correctly view a stereo negative, the two sides of the image have to be transposed. I have done the same with triplex (three lens) and tetraplex (four lens) negatives.

When a photo is printed in a magazine or book, rather than being produced in a darkroom, it is known as a halftone. Halftones actually contain no grays, instead they are made up of a grid of tiny black dots on a white background – the larger the dots, the darker the area of the image will appear to the human eye. I have saved all halftones as JPEGs so that they are among the least expensive images offered for download.

Original Civil War photos were cropped by hand, then mounted on a stiff paper board to prevent the curling they were prone to. I have retained the original cropping rather than squaring the corners and losing some of the image.