[drcy]

Yi needs someone like me to come in and simply put the photos in piles of originals, mades laters, etc. If you're not holdering and writing LOAs it won't take long. Just a matter of sorting and putting them in piles.

If Yi (if you are reading), I'd do it if you are near Seattle, but I wouldn't travel across the country to do it.

Once the photos are in groups, then everything after that should be easy.

Having written LOAs and cataloged an entire photography auction for an auction house, I can tell you that authenticating (specifically telling if something is original, wirephoto, made later, other) takes 20% percent of the time. It's the writing the LOA on the subject and writing/proofing the catalog description that takes 80%. Putting photos into groups might just be a matter of a few hours, depending on the size of the collection. I authenticated a collection of 25,000 once (included everything from Daguerreotypes to news photos to cabinet cards, sport and non sport), but that took more than a few hours.

Duly note, by authenticating in this post I'm not talking about facial recognition research of obscure people, doing family history for a family portrait from 1890 Tulsa, researching the statistical history of the game shown or matching the faces to the names of the 1872 US Congressional delegation. That stuff would take time and research and would be part of the above mentioned 80% of cataloging work. I'm talking about telling if a physical Babe Ruth news photo itself is original, reprint or whatever and putting MLB baseball photos into quick piles so Yi can deal with the photo-by-photo specifics when she wants later. If they are all MLB photos, I've been a baseball fan and baseball card collector since I was a kid and know what Gehrg, DiMaggio, Clemens, Robin Yount, Ryne, Tom Seaver, Christy Mathewson, et al look like at first glance. The one reason I knew right away the DiMaggio/Yankees photo was a reprint from modern times is I knew DiMaggio played long before the Kodak branding on back was used (1930-40s for DiMaggio versus 1970s-80 for that Kodak printing). If I was a Romanian in Bucharest and knew zero about baseball, I could have still told you the physical photo was probably from the 1970s-80s, but wouldn't have been able to tell you (without time and research) if it was original or a later reprint without knowledge of the subjects. Reprints are identified when the image subject and the physical photo don't match up date-wise, which means you have to have knowledge about both, not just one.

Yi can also send me a private message. I'm happy to answer questions about photos off board. I'm not buying or selling baseball photos, so no one else has to be suspicious of my motives.