If you like looking at different hairstyles, fashions and aesthetics from past decades (70s, 80s and 90s especially), E-Yearbook is worth every penny. It’s pretty cheap too - about twenty dollars for four months or thirty for an entire year.
You can browse hundreds of different scanned yearbooks from around the US, and search the text.
You can also probably find some hilarious pictures of friends, family and coworkers.
This is fun!!!
Did they pay royalties to all the photographers? I can’t even make copies of my own pictures taken by a photographer. How can they sell services to scanned yearbooks?
When you get back to 1920’s and earlier it gets really interesting. In those days somebody in the yearbook office usually thought of something funny or interesting about every single graduating senior. I have a physical copy of one of these from 1923, for Los Angeles High School, which gives the “Natural Gift”, “Acquired Trick”, and “Future Accomplishment” of each graduate. As an example, for one girl the three traits were “Thinking Beautiful Thoughts”, “Putting The Thoughts Into Words”, and “Spelling The Words As Others Do”.
My one complaint about E-Yearbooks is that don’t have much of the really old stuff, unfortunately. But I did have the pleasure of finding my grandfather–who died ten years before I was born–in the 1909 yearbook for the University of Kansas.
According to the Wikipedia article, all copyrightable works published in the United States before 1923 are public domain, but obviously that doesn’t explain the case of later yearbooks. Possibly they aren’t copyrightable to begin with.