I saw a presentation on The New York Times' photo "morgue" a while back. They've been digitizing it inclusing putting lots of effort into metadata because it's pretty much useless otherwise. https://www.nytimes.com/2018/11/10/reader-center/past-tense-...

There are also a lot of issues with making it generally accessible because the NYT doesn't own the rights to simply opening up the photos to the world.