Fortepan US (https://fortepan.us) is a cooperative portal network that offers an innovative and community-focused way to organize and display local and vernacular photos online. Focusing on user experience and the artful curation of meaningful photos for the public good, and interlinking state instances across the US, our project serves the public, cultural heritage institutions, and digital humanities scholars by virtually reuniting images according to place, time, and theme. See Fortepan IA (https://fortepan.us/ia) and Fortepan CT (https://fortepan.us/ct) as prototypes. 

Fortepan US virtually reunites family snapshots, small town photojournalism collections, town postcards, even FSA photos housed in the Library of Congress–isolated or forgotten in the same interface, arranges the photos along a timeline, and makes them available for public use, exploration, and storytelling. All photos are licensed to the Creative Commons (CC-BY-SA). 

Display options include Timeline, Grid, and Map views as well as Fullscreen and Autoplay. All filtered versions of Fortepan US (in any viewing format) can be both shared with a link or embedded into another website. 

Fortepan US is also dedicated to helping people interpret the public online photographs and build upon public memory to tell stories. Interpretation tools include: 
FotoAlbum for organizing photos by a customizable theme,
FotoStory for interpreting photos through shareable digital exhibits
FotoSphere for photo matching historical photos against a modern-day 360º image
FotoSphere Tour for interlinking FotoSpheres to create an historical “virtual walking tour”--a sort of Google Street View with historical images.

All can be shared by a link or embedded it into any website. 

We built the free Fortepan US portal with Kronofoto. The open source code is available for public use at https://github.com/fortepan-us/kronofoto. 

Please explore. We welcome conversations about building a Fortepan US instance for your state.


Fortepan US

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Fortepan US

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