Picture this: thousands of Edmonton historical photos online

Tim O'Grady is a time traveler. 

The City of Edmonton archivist spends his days poring through pics of our past.

"I love the photos," O'Grady says. "What I really like about the photo is it's really accessible and immediate."

Last October the City of Edmonton Archives launched a new website and began transferring selected black and while images from its massive collection onto the new system.

So far, O'Grady and the team have managed to upload more than half of their target of 50,000 photos.

The new database is called AtoM, an acronymn for Access to Memory, which is the standard in archives in Canada, according to O'Grady.

"You can search for a photo, through Google even. You find the photo, but then you can also find all the contextual information about that photo.

"So you would find a photo of a brewery for example and then you'd see this photograph is actually part of a much larger collection."

It's that kind of context that delights head archivist Kathryn Ivany.

"Before when we had photos up, you would just see the photograph but now you can see the story of the person who created the photograph, perhaps all the other photographs they took of their family, of their business," Ivany said.

Being able to link images together in this way makes for a richer experience, whether you're a student researching a local history project or a genealogical buff looking for faces from your family tree.

But the city archives doesn't only work with faded, black-and-white images. 

It continues to accept digital photos from Edmontonians to add to its ever growing collection.

However, Ivany admits they're pretty picky about what they take. They have to be in this digital age.

"The collections are getting larger as digital photos take over people's lives so we are going to actually be much more selective of the ones we put up on our website because we'd soon be overrun with images," she said.

You can see more from the City of Edmonton Archives in this week's edition of Our Edmonton on Saturday at 10 a.m., Sunday at noon and 11 a.m. on Monday on CBC TV.