About

What is this?

Every day we publish one historical photograph from the Alexander Turnbull Library, sourced through DigitalNZ. Each plate is AI colourised and reviewed before it goes live on the site, in the feed, and in the newsletter.

The originals remain in the archive. We are not replacing them — we are offering another way in.

Why we think it is worth doing

1. It surfaces material that often stays in the stacks. The library holds an enormous record of New Zealand life. Colour can help a photograph feel closer to the present, and a daily edition gives people a reason to stop and look.
2. It helps people connect with the past. Black-and-white can feel distant. A colourised plate is not history as it was lived, but it can invite curiosity about who was in the frame, where they were, and what was happening that day.
3. A small team can keep it going. Finding, colourising, and publishing one plate a day by hand would be a full-time job. AI makes a steady rhythm possible without a large studio behind it.
4. We keep the archive in the picture. Every edition links back to the library record, credits the creator where known, and states the rights. The source always comes first.

What to keep in mind

1. Colours are interpretive, not documentary. AI guesses at colour from a greyscale original. It cannot know what a dress, a sky, or a hillside really looked like. Treat every colourised plate as an impression, not evidence.
2. AI is not a historian. It can miss context, oversimplify, or get details wrong without showing its working. If you need certainty, read the official record — not our daily plate.
3. Using AI has a cost. Colourising photographs takes compute, and compute uses energy. We publish one plate a day rather than colourising everything we can find, partly for that reason.
4. Human review is a gate, not a guarantee. We check each edition before it ships, but we cannot promise perfection on every hue or caption.

How we do it

1. Find reusable photographs from the Alexander Turnbull Library via DigitalNZ.
2. Send the image to an AI colourisation model, with a human in the loop before anything is published.
3. Publish one edition each morning (New Zealand time), with attribution, rights, and a link to the original record.

If a plate is not to your taste, drag the compare slider on any edition to see the untouched original beside the colourised version.

On balance, we think the good outweighs the caveats — if we are clear about what AI can and cannot do, and if we always point you back to the archive. If you have questions or corrections, we would like to hear them.