I love photographs (no surprise), and I love history. So the Library of Congress Prints and Photographs Division is an awesome place for me. I use the website a lot to find examples  to include with my History of Photojournalism class, but I also can spend hours just roaming through the collections. There are just so many things to look at.

And now I can have some of those images automatically appear in my Chrome browser. And so can you.

An intern at the Library of Congress took on a project to develop a Chrome browser extension that would “increase the awareness of and interaction with” images in the Library of Congress collection that have no known copyright restrictions. By installing the extension, every time you open a tab in Chrome you’ll see a randomly-selected photograph from that collection. If you click on the title at the bottom of the background image you’ll be taken to the Library of Congress website information for that photograph. It’s an easy way to see things in the collection you might not otherwise encounter.

Here’s an example from my browser after loading the extension:

You can read about the project and find a link to download the extension on the Library of Congress The Signal blog here: https://blogs.loc.gov/loc/2018/08/free-to-use-and-reuse-pilot-browser-extension-supports-exploration-of-historical-images/

One thing to note is that the downloaded folder for the extension must remain in the same location on your computer for Chrome to find it. Otherwise it won’t load.

And congratulations to Kenyon College student Flynn Shannon, who developed the extension.