Ancient Web: Eric Praetzel Kept Six Decades of Travel in Linked Photo Pages

Part of the Ancient Web Collection.

Eric Praetzel's Vacation Pictures page is the opposite of the carefully edited travel influencer's feed. Some trips are sorted. Some are explicitly a mess. Almost all of them have a link.

Visit Eric Praetzel's Vacation Pictures.

Hosted under a University of Waterloo personal address, this enormous index gathers hikes, canoe trips, parks, caves, skiing, and family photographs. The headings divide Canadian parks, American parks, other destinations, and pictures still awaiting organization. The unfinished sections remain visible, which gives the collection the recognizable texture of an actual personal archive.

Film slides beside digital-era hikes

Much of the directory documents outdoor trips made from the 1990s into the 2010s. A 1992 Algonquin Park entry describes Praetzel leading the University of Waterloo Outers Club on a 32-kilometer loop of the Western Uplands Trail. Elsewhere the index lists Gros Morne mountain routes, Banff hikes, Killarney canoe journeys, and visits to British Columbia.

The photographs go much farther back than the website. Its folders include scanned slides labelled Spain in 1956 and 1959, a 1961 Grand Canyon and Yellowstone trip, and images of Expo 67. These are scans of older family media, not claims that those trips had web pages in the 1950s.

The West Berlin gallery is particularly striking. Praetzel identifies the pictures as slides taken by his father after the Berlin Wall went up in August 1961 and before his father's departure for Canada in 1962. The captions list Checkpoint Charlie, the Brandenburg Gate, and several border streets, sometimes admitting uncertainty about exact locations.

A link index as a family history instrument

The homepage also describes experiments with tiling photographs to create large images before stitching software reliably handled the task. That observation places the page in the transition from film and scanners to digital photography.

An earlier Ancient Web article covers one separate Bruce Peninsula trip hosted under the same address. This broader directory is a distinct subject: the organization of decades of personal and family material into a public, evolving photographic index.

Not every linked gallery works today, but the surviving sections preserve itineraries, dates, and the author's own notes about what remains to be identified.

Explore the full vacation index and the 1961–62 Berlin slide notes.

Part of the Ancient Web Collection.