Old photographs from Helsinki City Museum

This is an image dataset consisting of 5947 old photographs (until 1917) from the collections of the Helsinki City Museum, obtained from the Finna.fi discovery service. The images are intended to be used for different AI/ML tasks such as generating captions or colorizing them.

The images themselves are JPEG files under the directory images.

The metadata.jsonl file contains metadata about each image, for example descriptive captions (mostly in Finnish), subject keywords, location and the name of the photographer. The file is in JSON Lines format (each line is a JSON record). The file_name column contains the relative path of the JPEG image file.

The Python script collect-hkm.py was originally used to retrieve the metadata and images from the from Finna API.

The images have been published by the Helsinki City Museum in Finna using the Creative Commons Attribution 4.0 license and these attribution instructions:

The terms and conditions of Helsinki City Museum images published in Finna are given separately for each image. Images marked with CC BY 4.0 can be freely downloaded and used as long as the names of the photographer/artist (if known) and Helsinki City Museum are mentioned. The user is responsible for respecting copyright and privacy. Using portraits, for example, in marketing and/or advertising is forbidden without permission from the person pictured. More detailed licensing terms can be found on the Creative Commons licensing website.