In its mission to visit and photo-document historic bridges, the HistoricBridges.org team faces limitations in time and resources and as a result there are countless historic bridges that have not yet been documented by HistoricBridges.org. Among the undocumented bridges are bridges with worldwide heritage value and fame whose documentation is absolutely essential to understanding the history of bridge construction and context of historic bridges in general. In addition, there are also bridges present on HistoricBridges.org that are incompletely photo-documented due to the limitations of a single-visit documentation (such as weather and lighting conditions) that composes the typical HistoricBridges.org photo-documentation. HistoricBridges.org's single visit photo-documentations fail to provide a documentation of the appearance and beauty of a bridge in different weather and seasonal conditions, as well as the different views and angles that may be photographed due to these conditions.
HistoricBridges.org is able to help solve the aforementioned problems with a Public Photograph Compilation (PPC). With the advent of photo-sharing programs like Flickr and the frequent use of Creative Commons photo licensing, there are today numerous high-quality photographs of famous and/or extremely important historic bridges available for free reuse with citation. These photo repositories are largely unorganized, divided up amongst the millions of users sharing photos. Using a website like Flickr to quickly find and view a complete photo-documentation of a historic bridge is difficult because in most cases, no single user offers a full documentation of a bridge, and web searches of these repositories often return useful photos that are scattered within the thousands of irrelevant and "junk" photos that are of little or no use.
For selected bridges, HistoricBridges.org has sifted through thousands of photos returned from searching websites like Flickr, selected the best photos, and created a comprehensive photo-documentation, presented in an organized and convenient HistoricBridges.org photo gallery. Since most photographers are not bridge experts and enthusiasts, there tends to be a lack of detail photos to document the construction of the bridge, but on the other hand, there is often a wide variety of creative and beautiful overview photos.
The Public Photograph Compilations (PPC) concept was developed by HistoricBridges.org in late 2009, and it is expected that PPC's will be added to the website in between adding bridges from official bridge documentation projects. While it is expected that Public Photograph Compilations will always comprise a very small sliver of HistoricBridges.org content, PPCs will allow HistoricBridges.org to present documentation for select bridges with world heritage value that are located far outside the current coverage area of HistoricBridges.org, including bridges from Europe and other countries across the world.
The photos in the Public Photograph Compilation galleries are legally offered by HistoricBridges.org for free because they are licensed under a Creative Commons license and attributed (cited) as specified by the source website. As required under the license, HistoricBridges.org hereby states that none of the photographers endorse HistoricBridges.org and its ideas, nor are they affiliated with HistoricBridges.org in any way.
