I apologize if this has been posted before, but I just recently discovered this for myself and wanted to share with those who didn't know. US Library of Congress has digitized and posted a large number of photos from its collection on the web. Most of the digitized photos are from 1890s-1910s (through there are many later ones as well). Among them a huge number of photos of the warships of that period. And those are the ships that are usually impossible to find. The best thing about it is that in addition to the previews they've posted a very high quality .tiff files that can be downloaded and allow you to see every detail of the ship. The fans of the US pre-dreadnoughts and early dreadnought time period ships will find it most useful as there are huge number of photos there (including deck views), but other nation's ships that have visited US are also present there. For example here are some French pre-dreadnoughts (click on the link to go to the information page for the photo, tiffs can be downloaded from there):
Justice
http://www.loc.gov/pictures/collection/ ... 8cb58ff91e
http://www.loc.gov/pictures/item/det199 ... fa9762cd3a
Liberte
http://www.loc.gov/pictures/collection/ ... 8cb58ff91e
http://www.loc.gov/pictures/item/det199 ... fa9762cd3a
Verite
http://www.loc.gov/pictures/item/det199 ... 953ddb48a9
Main photo search page is here:
http://www.loc.gov/pictures/
Vladimir
