Back and forth in time with old postcards! Digital indeed. We will look for your precious digital memories, which we will then properly archive. And also: “Present!” We make smart use of the possibilities that FastStone Image Viewer has to offer.
In the past, postcards were the dirt-cheap and quick alternative (because already developed and printed) for the photos at the time, but the very expensive alternative for today’s social media (because buying a card and sticking a stamp). From your holiday address you sent postcards to family and friends, to keep them informed and to make them jealous. Nowadays you can arrange everything for free and easily with the help of your smartphone. This aside.
In the meantime they have authentic postcards keep their charm. The printed photos are taken in exactly the right and most beautiful places. And when the captured images are already a bit older, the nostalgia literally drips from it. Do you remember, Het Dorp by Wim Sonneveld: “At home I still have a postcard with a church, a cart with a horse…” By the way, in 2021 you can still buy postcards, often in the form of flat jokes.
Recalling memories
It’s time to bring back some memories. To la France profonde, to the gemütliche Heimat, to the former British Empire. Just walk through your memory palace and see all the nice places pass by again. And then open the website www.delcampe.net. It is a website for collectors of stamps, postcards, coins, banknotes, and so on. The postcards department in particular is well represented on this website and this naturally concerns the sale of the original ‘hardcopies’ of those postcards (called rigid postcards on this site).
We stay nearby for convenience. click on postcards, Then on Europe, Then on France. Then click through to the Region and the Township what matters. As a result, a world of memories is opened: black and white, in colour, landscapes, buildings, portraits, collages, even some humor here and there. And one thing is one hundred percent sure; you can’t get it in front of your lens like this anymore! Why time machine?
Find and save
Now that we’ve found a comprehensive source for postcards, we can start collecting the images we want digitally. Browse the said website and click on any thumbnail view. A large preview of the postcard (possibly to be purchased) is then displayed and a simple click on the right mouse button brings up the image options of the web browser. With context menu option anyway Save Image As. That is what you will do for a while: “Search, click, rate and save.”
You have to be a little smart about saving that. For example by entering the personal folder Pictures a subfolder postcards to create. With within that subfolder postcards each subject (country, region, municipality, village) has its own subfolder with a matching name. Logical, because that way we keep it nicely organized for later and later. In the meantime, your task is to collect quite a few digital postcards!
Alternative Sites
By the way, you are not stuck with the mentioned in the article www.delcampe.net. We immediately list some alternatives when it comes to searching and finding postcards:
www.ansichtkaartenbeurs.nl, www.house-of-cards.nl, www.postcardsfrom.nl, www.printletters.info, www.postvanvroeger.nl, www.marktplaats.nl, www.oldpostcards.com, www.ebay.com, www.vintagepostcards.com.
FastStone Image Viewer
In the meantime, there are some digital postcards in the corresponding subfolders and the collection is therefore already nicely organized, because with Windows Explorer there is already a lot to see and do. But it can be done better, easier, more convenient and more beautiful using the popular photo editing tool FastStone Image Viewer found at www.faststone.org. Please download, install, launch and navigate to the main digital postcards folder. As you can see, a nice overview is immediately given, where of course you set the image to Thumbnail View. Just open a subfolder to see its contents. Click in a subfolder on a digital postcard to get an example presented – bottom left of the screen. Chances are you think it’s good enough already, but of course it doesn’t work that way!
Refined cropping
In the meantime, take a very critical look at such an example in the lower left-hand corner of the screen. If all goes well, you will see some disturbing edges and sometimes a digital postcard is not completely straight. And that’s not nice! The solution is the refined cropping of the map, a job that FastStone Image Viewer can handle very well. Right-click that example and choose the context menu option To process and crop.
The so-called crop screen will then appear and now it is possible to free the selected postcard from edges and skew. Set the ratio to Lasso and use the mouse pointer to capture the correct frame. Then click on the button Qualitative crop to file. If the dialog box of the same name Qualitative crop to file appears, uncheck the option Name + “_cr “. Then click Save and overwrite the original digital postcard.
And now pay attention! FastStone Image Viewer thinks ahead and as soon as you have saved the cropped map, the next – not yet cropped – copy is immediately read in. So you can immediately continue with all other postcards in the same subfolder! Handy, isn’t it?
Presenting postcards
When you’ve finally filled your postcard subfolders and worked through it, it’s time to showcase that hard work. FastStone Image Viewer can also help you with this. Just click on the menu option Design, to see that there are four presentation options. With the top, Design slideshow file, create an exe play file that you can start right away. That playback file can present, browse and also export the postcards to a folder on the hard drive. The option Design contact sheet put the postcards together as miniatures. A contact sheet can be saved to PDF, but also to jpg, png and tif. With the Design multi-page file option, each postcard gets its own page; with or without a shadow underneath. It can be written to pdf, tif and Animated gif. With the option Design strip from images the photos are pasted horizontally or vertically below or next to each other. Not as thumbnails, but with the same height or width (set by you). Saving is done to all kinds of file formats, including of course pdf, jpg, png and tif.
Finishing
One option of FastStone Image Viewer that deserves a special mention is Additional and Convert selected images. You then use a very advanced dialog where you start by making a selection of the postcards you want to have edited. It is important to have the option Use advanced effects ticking the box, because with that you indicate that you want to use just about all photo editing effects. Options include resizing, rotating, adjusting colors, adding borders, and even adding a watermark.
With which you can provide those postcards with the desired personal touch. It sounds complicated, but FastStone Image Viewer takes you almost literally by the hand, where you always decide how easy or difficult it should be. And then save those post-processed postcards in a new presentation.
That village from then, it’s over
This is all that remained for me
A postcard and memories
(From The Village, 1974)
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