Tech Tuesday: A Chance Encounter and a Photo Mystery Solved

Years ago I bought an interesting image at a photo show.  It was completely unidentified--no name and no photographer's markings. 

 

I'd never gotten around to researching the image. Last summer I included it in one of my talks at the International Jewish Genealogical Society conference in Boston.  As soon as I put it up on the screen, a man called out that he knew the identity of this soldier.  He told me that this was Field Marshal von Moltke, a Prussian military expert.  

This was a great test for Google Images. To see if there are matches to a particular image you can either cut and paste a URL in the search box or upload an image to the search box.  I choose the latter.

In this case, there was an exact match on the iCollector.com website.

Google Images isn't 100% effective.  It provides you with exact matches and then visually similar pictures. For the purpose of this search, Google found other carte des visite images of people posed like von Moltke and some that don't have much in common with the image I searched.  

Identity confirmed. Case closed.  Thank you to Paul Silverstone for positively identifying an image from my collection.