The invention of photography in the middle of the XIX century changed a person's idea of ​ ​ the world around him, and after a while - and knowledge of the past. Previously, the story was mainly text, thanks to photography, it is supplemented with an image. Several portraits and a dozen engravings left over from Yekaterinburg of the 18th - early 19th centuries are incomparable with hundreds of photographs of the subsequent era. We can almost as easily navigate in Yekaterinburg at the turn of the XIX - XX centuries, as in a modern city, we can study the daily life of people of past generations.