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.

Renewed interest in photos

Interest in the photo has resurfaced after Singaporean academic Cherian George wrote on Facebook about its access on Feb. 5, 2021:

Explaining the origins of the photos being other than from the Central Intelligence Agency (CIA), George wrote:

Quips about these being CIA photos got me wondering about their actual origins. The photographers (not credited) are more likely to be European (or their Asian assistants) than American. Their black-and-white photographic negatives were turned into ink-based colour lithographs through a technology developed by a Swiss printing firm whose subsidiary Photochrom Zürich (later Photoglob Zürich AG) marketed the images. The Photochrom Print Collection has thousands of such images from all over the world. They were made mostly between the 1890s and the 1910s, usually 6.5 x 9 inches in size. The prints were sold as souvenirs and often collected in albums or framed for display. The US Library of Congress assembled the non-US collection from the Galerie Muriset in Switzerland.