Some of this data is valuable. Giving it away to strangers on the internet makes it less so.
Yea i know, i've spent $100s off ebay for catalogs and ads and flyers.
but does hoarding it really help that single individual? there's a greater need for the masses. I know this is a concept that is foreign to most people, but having a central library where this stuff can be found is helpful for all.
Also from what images i find on the interweb they are usually bad contrast, bad crop and bad sizes. I use some imaging tools and make them larger and more clear with better contrast, square them up, and READABLE. that requires a fair amount of work, compared to the, "look at my crappy picture (not even a scan) i took with my cell phone." And then where possible i put them into a PDF (which if you have been following Adobe lately, is not a cheap proposition either.)
Look if you guys think you having the only (catalog/magazine) copy around is a good thing, then i guess that's your bag. But frankly i see that as being self centered and not a community. I guess it's not all that surprising given the freak show that is this community, but i have a bigger vision where we share information freely. For the most part people do that here, but for some reason, old catalogs/ads/flyers/manuals seems to be where people change their minds.
On the watermark thing, what a joke that is. You guys don’t own the images, text, or the photographs. You don’t own the catalog right. You don’t own the Minibike company that paid the artists and photographers for that. Stop putting watermarks on shit you don’t own. That would be like walking around a Minibike show and putting stickers on all the bikes with your name, and then telling everybody that those are your bikes. It doesn’t work that way. Now if you want to put some kind of mark that says something like “scanned by someone” with a date, OK you can get away with that. That’s informational is interesting. But to put your watermark on it implies that you own the images, which you do not. Unless you took the pictures or you own the rights to that catalog, the stuff is not yours to watermark