Sheldon or his assistants took most of them. The Smithsonian has given certain photographs of students to their colleges. There are also photographs of child growth studies, including selected cases from the Growth Study of the Institute of Child Development at the University of California at Berkeley and the Gesell Institute in New Haven, Connecticut. There are also photographs made by other researchers in the field of constitutional studies. Most of Sheldon's own photographs and many others include information about the subjects such as identification, date, place, age, height, weight, and the numerical classification following the Sheldon scheme for morphological types.
Some photographs have special information about illnesses and other conditions.
There are other notes for some photographs. The Smithsonian has given certain photographs of students to their colleges. Following Sheldon's death, the collection was in the custody of Dorothy Paschal, Roland Elderkin, Emil Hartl, and Edward P. Monnelly. Paschal was the one to whom Sheldon left the collection. She had been an assistant, handling many of Sheldon's administrative matters and, with other women, taking photographs of females.