Second thought (Better idea): After seeing the second photo and thinking more of the timeframe these are taken… Photographs then were most likely daguerreotypes and tintypes. Which means their prints were in reverse, and they do not use negatives, like modern film photography, so flipping the photo right-side up was not a straight forward process

This is a neat idea, but it makes me wonder why there aren’t more examples if it was so useful for early photography. Or maybe there were, and we’ve just lost any record of them.