Several dozen high-resolution images of Singapore from the early 20th century were digitised and released by the New York Public Library on Jan. 6, 2016.

This is part of the library's generous move to make its digital collection as available as possible, having uploaded 187,000 images free for all to use.

All of the photographs — rare and unique as they all are — have become public domain works, which means they are no longer restricted under copyright law.

And not only are they now available for high-resolution download from the NYPL, they have experimented with a visualisation tool that lets the public toggle between images sorted by century, genre, collection, and even colour.

Searching for images using "Singapore" as the keyword throws up several dozen images of old Singapore from the early 1900s:

Check out the rest of the Singapore images here.

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