Origin of the postcards & rights

The collection gathered in FranceJadis is the fruit of forty years of work on old postcards, from three sources:

• postcards brought together under professional agreements made between 1984 and 2020 with other companies, now defunct, in the course of the business of a company I was running at the time; kept after its liquidation;
• paper postcards, lent to me, which I digitized myself;
• postcards I came across while browsing the web.

Most of these postcards were digitized around 1990.

The postcards shown in FranceJadis date, for the most recent ones, from around 1930 — most are much older. Under French law, a photograph whose author is unknown (the usual case for these postcards) enters the public domain 70 years after publication; a work whose author is known, 70 years after the author's death. In both cases, the postcards shown here are far beyond these periods: they are free of rights.

That leaves the question of the digitization itself: since European directive 2019/790, transposed into French law, a faithful reproduction of a public-domain visual work — a simple scan, with no creative contribution of its own — gives rise to no new right. The digitization of a rights-free postcard is therefore also free of rights.

Beyond simply making them available, each postcard has been worked on:

• identification of each postcard's caption by image analysis (for some, the text had been typed in by hand in the past);
• geolocation by an algorithm I developed (address → GPS coordinates, with particular attention to road junctions), completed by manual research and, since 2024, by the help of artificial intelligence and the use of Apple Look Around and Google Street View;
• image quality improvement by artificial intelligence;
• colorization of the pictures by artificial intelligence (to be seen as an approximate rendering, not as a certified reconstruction of the original colors).

It is this work — not the postcards themselves — that represents most of the investment behind FranceJadis.

If you are the author or rights holder of a postcard shown here, or if you believe a picture was taken from a site you publish, contact me through the contact page: any request for removal or credit will be dealt with promptly.