A digital replacement for the postcard wall that I used to have in my office. I set this up in 1992 in my office at the Boulevard du Souverain in Brussels, and transferred it (in physical form) in 1995 to my new office at Bibb Way, Ipswich, when I returned to the UK. Unfortunately, this never worked as well, as the accommodation was somewhat naff compared with Brussels (even before they went open plan) and the partitions were so flimsy that the postcards never stuck properly.
This digital form should be more durable as the postcards will not keep falling off the wall every time the temperature fluctuates (e.g. when the heating goes off overnight or at weekends!). I have also noticed when scanning them that some of the postcards have faded over time (as they are continually on display) and some have deteriorated slightly with parts of them flaking off. Fading and deterioration can be corrected once in digital form (e.g. using Auto Contrast and the Rubber Stamp tool in Photoshop) and some of them have been touched up. At least there can not be any further deterioration once they are in digital form.
However, this will suffer from the same durability problems that any web site faces - i.e. it only stays in existence for as long as you pay your bill to the ISP and as long as the site continues to have power and communications. There's also the question of formats - I've used JPEG compression to reduce the images to a reasonable size (so that I can get several on the screen at once) and to get a faster download time. However, more efficient compression tools may come along in the future which make JPEG obsolete - and then how long would JPEG continue to be supported by browsers? There's also the question that if I eventually buy a new scanner, will I still be happy with the quality of the images I've scanned using the old one or will I want to scan them all in again? So taking all this into account, in the long run my postcards may not turn out to be very durable in this form after all!
To work, this relies on the physical layout of the postcards being reproduced accurately and so a fixed page width has been used. This will mean you can't see all of it at once on your screen unless you can reduce the size of the images on the screen (zoom out). I have also taken the easy option of re-sizing all the cards to be the same height, whereas in reality they come in several different sizes - and this would arguably lead to more interesting layout options.
Most of these cards have been selected for the beauty of their images, but many also have special memories... I apologize if I've infringed any copyrights for these cards, but the compression I have used is such that commercial reproduction from them would not be possible, and I'm happy to acknowledge any copyrights in any case and will put in links to the owners' web sites if requested.
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