Mill Pictures website 🌍

Whilst the Mill Pictures website primarily concerns itself with watermills, with a catchy domain name like that, I'm somewhat surprised that I've not stumbled into the website before. The website has been running since at least 2011, run by Jim Miller (nominative determinism at work there!), who describes himself as a historian. Its tag line is "Mills and covered bridges from all over the world", but to be honest it's pretty much exclusively the USA, and just mills from there.

In 2011, the earliest archived version of the page I can find, it hosted 1514 locations, with 7256 photos. In 2026 it's actually only grown slightly, with 1842 locations, and 9921 pictures. Of those, the picture list indicates that there are only actually 3 barns, 9 school houses, and 2 bridges - the rest of the locations are mills. Of the international claim, there are but single locations in each of Australia, Germany, Italy, and South Africa, and 18 Canadian ones - all the rest are in the USA. The bio page describes the Oregon coast as home, but the coverage of that state only manages 31 mills - the top state is Pennsylvania with 864, with a sharp drop off after that, only Virginia, New Jersey, and Maryland have more than 100 mills covered, and most states are less than 20. By an unfortunate typo, there's even 1 mill given as Massachusutts, which is only one behind the correctly spelled state!

The site unfortunately shows lots of signs of lack of maintenance. For example on the home page there is a banner announcing "now get it on your phone", advertising a mobile app, but neither the Android nor IPhone apps still exist. It appears these were 2018 era apps, and with the Android app recording only about 50 downloads in 3 years, I'm not surprised that the considerable effort required to keep these apps available has not been forthcoming. (The apps were created by AboutWD, presumably under contract, and I assume they were simply wrappers of the website content, rather than full native apps).

Another telltale sign of missing maintenance is, despite the few links to external sites, these links use http rather than the https that most sites now use.

I could only find 2 included windmills - their entries have been linked from the appropriate pages on this site.