Date Picture Postcards

Since most of the picture postcards have no year specified on their back, I'd like to start this thread for helping ascertain the year of these products.

I start with two Austrian postcards.
Can someone put a date on them? (year)

Publisher: H. Schuster

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Publisher: Fleischmann & Jaeger

In general, a practical goal is to identify the decade, never mind the year

In modern photochromes (cards like the ones you've shown), consider the size.

In the US, you'll find both 3x5 and 4x6 photochromes. Different publishers switched at different times.

Also, look at the quality. The early photochromes (especially in the US) were bloody awful: the color registration was so poor that the early cards (eg 1950s 3x5s) can be painful to look at.

But European publishers switched to photochrome much later, so these will almost always be 4x6, and almost always be of a higher quality.

My guess? Your cards are probably 1970s-1980s.

Wanna do better?

1) The number of digits in the telephone number & the postal code in the publisher's imprint will set reliably hard limits on the date range.

2) http://www.metropostcard.com/metrop...lishers.html ... you will find many publishers listed in the MPC database with some indication of the years in which they operated ... but no database is perfect

3) Lastly, of course, there's content. Do a Google image search on the subject - or use Google Earth, if appropriate - and use the buildings or features that are not in your card's image to help set the date.

Sometimes, you can get lucky with details like scaffolding on an historic church ... if you can find out when they were sandblasting that exterior, Bob's your uncle.

And, sometimes, you can get stupid-lucky because a well-documented skyline is constantly changing. Don't let the sepia tones in the postcard (below) fool you. The image includes the New York Merchandise Mart, completed in 1974, and a building that I'm pretty sure is the not-yet-complete 3 Park Avenue, completed in 1975.

Cheers,

/s/ ikeyPikey

Nobody knows anything about the above Austrian ones?

Hope there is someone familiar with the French postcards.
Do you know the year of the following three?

Publisher Chantal:

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Publisher Centre des monuments nationaux:

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Publisher RIBO:

Ikey, I agree fully with you. Fist thought as the quality off the color and pointed at the seventies. Also, the Volkswagon bus seems to date the card pretty close


Peter

ikeyPikey, thanks for the response.

Yes, the decade is easier to guess but it is still too general.
If not the exact year, would be good to put on the postcard "Early Seventies", "Mid Seventies" or "Late Seventies", at least.

I forgot to mention the cars because I am largely indifferent to cars; in fact, over the years, I've put up a few cards on SCF asking people to identify the model years of the cars on a card.

This works best when one of the cars is a Studebaker, for reasons that escape me.

Remember that cars only set the earliest possible date; I drive a 2001 Mercury Grand Marquis, myself.

Clothing styles can sometimes offer a clue, as can any advertising (the product, the logo, the slogan) if the image is of Piccadilly Circus or Times Square or ...

Cheers,

/s/ ikeyPikey

The year the photo was taken and the year the mage was published may be separated by a considerable amount of time. Early 1900s negatives were used and reused and touched-up for many years rather than take a new photo.