I'm posting it here because the Gothic Horror section is where I do most of my posting but I believe every member of this forum may have an interest in this. If the moderators think there is a better place for this feel free to move it.
I recently saw a short article by Peter Bright about this published on Dec 14 2013. Here is a link to the article
http://arstechnica.com/information-technology/2013/12/british-library-sticks-1-million-pics-on-flickr-asks-for-help-making-them-useful/Art departments of major libraries have been maintaining picture galleries; photographs and illustrations cut from newspapers, magazines and damaged books for decades. These are literally thousands of huge folders of clippings with highly generalized titles like "fashion", "dress", "horse", etc... I remember them fondly when I was an art student. I've now spent some hours going through a very small fraction of the images on the British Library Flicker site there is an amazing amount of materiel which would be of interest to the war gamer. I've taken a number of images of the site for my own personal enjoyment/reference some of which I'll post here below this paragraph. No the problem the library has is that the only information recorded about each individual image is the name of the publication and the page number the image was on nothing more. To make matters worse it that many of these publications are in Dutch, French, German and Russian with untranslated captions. I urge you to browse the collection for yourself and see what you can find. I've collected mostly 19th century images as my blog centers on that period but there is a wealth of 17th and 18th century images in the collection. Here is a link to the British Library Flickr page:
http://www.flickr.com/photos/britishlibraryHere are some gems I pulled of the British Library Flickr page, the original library captions are beneath the pictures.

Image taken from page 314 of 'Gleanings from popular authors, etc'

Image taken from page 37 of 'Our Gipsies in city, tent, and van ... Illustrated, etc'

Image taken from page 327 of 'The Memorial Story of America, comprising the important events, episodes, and incidents which make up the record of four hundred years from 1492 to 1892, etc.

Image taken from page 571 of '[Our Earth and its Story; a popular treatise on physical geography. Edited by R. Brown. With ... coloured plates and maps, etc.]'
More randomly selected images can be found on my blog
http://fiendsinwaistcoats.blogspot.com/