[mattigames]

The quality of that photo is so bad that it arguably hardly counts as anything, I cannot even understand it's head position. I bet most people wouldn't recognize it as a cat unless you tell them first that its supposed to be one.

[walrus01]

This is a very uninformed comment if you understand even the most rudimentary of the problems involved in early photography and the history of the daguerrotype and photograph, specifically, that exposures needed to be multiple seconds long to capture an image.

[mattigames]

Yes I know about exposure, this isn't about the technical qualms of any giving photograph but the utility it has for the general public by being smudged to this degree.

[andrewflnr]

The real problem looks like glare, at least to my rudimentarily informed eye.

[walrus01]

Lenses and optics in general were also extremely rudimentary at that time, it looks to me like a combination of the cat moving during an 8 second exposure and a hand-ground lens.

[Nition]

The head is on the far left, drinking from the saucer.

[msephton]

So only "good" first photos should count?

[mattigames]

Non-smudged photos yeah, otherwise you could say any smudge of colors is any animal you claim.

[msephton]

I mean, the photo is clearly a cat drinking milk from a saucer.

Details and alternative cat photos that are as old (which is "first" is unknown) https://workman.tumblr.com/post/120829319747/houghtonlib-hou...

[mattigames]

"clearly" is such a stretch, this photo would be completely useless to someone who has never seen a cat before, they wouldn't learn to recognize it from such picture alone, the other photos you linked do look a lot better.

[LoganDark]

It's Bigfoot!

[mattigames]

Now I'm wondering what was the first viral fake photo of big foot