Find almost anyone online
Each photo is catalogued with the list of people shown and when available, other metadata such as the date.
The Australian Jewish Historical Society (AJHS) is excited to announce the first release of a multi-year project that features over 13,000 photos of the Australian Jewish community.
Each photo is catalogued with the list of people shown and when available, other metadata such as the date. On the AJHS collections page, people can search among the 9500+ subjects identified in the photos.
When searchers select a person’s name, they will see all associated photos with that subject and can also see a list of other people who share a photo with this person.
The AJHS suggests, “See if you can find yourself, your relatives, past and present friends, colleagues, rabbis, classmates and so on.”
Within these 13,000 photos are people. Lots of people. Because AJHS wanted to identify as many subjects as possible in the photos, it became a long-term project.
The first step was to find software that allowed for efficient facial recognition.

After some trialling, AJHS chose Tag That Photo, a Canadian product that its volunteers could use to identify a person in a photo.
The software uses AI-based facial recognition to search the entire collection and suggest matches.
While it saved AJHS a tremendous amount of time and effort, another benefit was that Tag That Photo respects privacy and is not cloud-based.
After all the face tagging was complete, AJHS went through a process of exporting the metadata for every photo that contained the subjects’ names and the rectangle coordinates of where the faces were.
From there, the data was imported into its collections database. An interface was created that shows the tagging of the subject’s name next to their face and also allows for searching and browsing of the 9500+ people found in all the photos.
At the bottom of each photo record page, is a link to a form where searchers can provide more information, such as the name of a person not identified, corrections or more details about the photo, such as the event, location or year.
Jeff Schneider, AJHS collections specialist, when thanking AJHS president Peter Philippsohn for spearheading the project, The Australian Jewish News for supplying photos from the 1960s to 2000 and AJHS’s web hosting company Medeopolis IT Solutions, said, “Look for more photos to come later.”
Access photos at: collections.ajhs.com.au/Browse/photos
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