Is there a public domain resource for pictures of people along with their ages at the time that the picture was taken?

July 19, 2009 7:05 PM

Is there a public domain resource for pictures of people along with their ages at the time that the picture was taken? The best I've come up with is places with government info which have pictures of politicians. Anything better with a wider range of types of people and ages? Obviously dating sites would be a great place to get this info, but none of them are going to be public domain.
posted by HappyEngineer to Media & Arts (10 answers total)

May not be public domain, and not quite age-related, but here's a photo-based chart of people with differing height and weight.
posted by suedehead at 8:06 PM on July 19, 2009

Oh, of course. Mugshots.

here's a realtime stream of 'em.

And tons of face image datasets to download, but those probably won't be public domain. You can check the license though.
posted by delmoi at 10:17 PM on July 19, 2009

(Oh, this dataset is from the government, and thus public domain. Except it's a dataset of... mugshots)
posted by delmoi at 10:19 PM on July 19, 2009

Response by poster: Thanks! I loved the height-weight site, but they don't have ages on many of them and I don't see anything indicating they are public domain.

However, the mugshots look promising!

@delmoi, your link "tons of face image datasets to download" seems to be broken.
posted by HappyEngineer at 11:29 PM on July 19, 2009

HappyEngineer, are you having a birthday this week too? (I was looking for the same thing a couple days ago since I'm wondering if I "look" my actual age)

The best I could manage was to look at Wikipedia for categories of people who accomplished various things at that age. Which is far from exact... and leads to a lot of folks who accomplished dying at that age.

like the mugshots, I suspect it's a less than ideal sampling for getting a look at the actual average, since people about to drop dead aren't the picture of health, and folks being arrested often have substance abuse issues going on which causes premature aging.
posted by Kellydamnit at 1:58 AM on July 20, 2009

A great project would be to construct a site along the lines of the height/weight one but where people could simply upload their photo to a slot for the day on which they were born. As Kellydamnit says I am sure most of us have a prurient interest in how we look in comparison to others of the same age.
posted by rongorongo at 3:26 AM on July 20, 2009

Things like the NYTimes wedding announcements have pictures and ages (in the narrative). One of my favorite things to do is to try to guess ages from picture only. I'm wrong like 85% of the time.
posted by Pineapplicious at 6:38 AM on July 20, 2009

How about the Library of Congress? Try a search for "age thirty", "age 30", and similar.
posted by fings at 2:26 PM on July 20, 2009

Oops, here is the face Image dataset index I meant to link too last time.
posted by delmoi at 9:23 PM on July 20, 2009

Response by poster: @Kellydamnit, actually, I'm looking for this info because I'm terrible at guessing peoples ages. I was thinking of making a site which did things like display a page of portraits of people all the same age. Then, given that large sample of images you would try to guess the age of the people.

I figure that getting good at guessing ages is just a matter of practice. In normal life I rarely find out the exact ages of people I meet. It just isn't very polite to inquire about a person's age except at a birthday party.

The mugshots may not be a perfect sampling, but it looks like a pretty good source of data given the large amount of pictures available.

Unfortunately that still leaves younger people. I doubt that many 4 year olds have mugshots. But I'll take what I can get.
posted by HappyEngineer at 10:54 PM on July 20, 2009