You can't imagine how many photographs are at the Boston Public Library. Even we can't, and that's after a lively telephone talk with Sinclair Hitchings, 66, curator of the collection, the man who led the effort to bird-dog and tag the hundreds of thousands of images ranging from art prints to news photos to 100-year-old images of the Western wilderness.

Photographic collections have been donated to the BPL since 1850, just a decade after the medium was invented. Among its 650,000 photographs are every imaginable documentary image of Boston, including the morgue of the old Boston Herald-Traveler's news photos.

We, the people, can see anything we want ("It's a public library," says Hitchings) - images of the Old West, the Civil War, a World War II battleship we may have served on, the Kennedy family, or the first car that drove over the Mystic Bridge. A local history buff was curious about that car, which he remembered as being antique. He called the BPL, made an appointment, rode up to the third-floor aerie, and had a great look at a grand car. We can, too.

The library often presents exhibitions. "Love Makes a Family" - images of lesbian, gay, bisexual, and transgender people and their families - is on view in the Boston Room of the new building through Nov. 29. In the BPL's Jamaica Plain branch, Walter Silva's photographs of young African-American men who live and work in Boston's neighborhoods - mainly Jamaica Plain, Roxbury, Dorchester, and Mattapan - runs through Nov. 30.

From Nov. 10 to Feb. 12, the Society for the Preservation of New England Antiquities opens "Boston Close Up," featuring pictures of downtown a century ago.

Boston Public Library, Copley Square. 617-536-5400. Print Department, ext. 280, or 281. Jamaica Plain Branch, 12 Sedgewick St. 617-524-2053. (Get directions to Copley and Jamaica Plain locations).

SPNEA gallery, One Bowdoin Square, Boston. 617-570-9105.

- L.M.