Sometimes I go past an old looking building or see some traces of old signage on a store and wonder what they used to be, especially when those traces are hard to read or obscured.
I have good news: It exists! http://retrographer.org/
A lot of them are unrecognizable, but here’s an example of a good one: http://retrographer.org/photos/4215
The bad news is that’s a bit limited. It was the senior project of a CMU student in 2010. It only exists for Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania. If you wanted to make one for another city, though, I think you could contact the creator, ask for the code, and then recruit people to get a ton of photos from another city’s historical institutions, and then crowdsource geotagging them (which is what the guy did).
This should be a Google maps feature, how cool would that be.
Isn’t it? I get peoples photos occasionally in place of Street View for certain locations.
If I remember correctly, Microsoft experimented with something like this years ago. I tried to find a link but no luck. As I recall it focused on stitching together user-uploaded photos to create a panoramic view of a location over time.
That sounds really fun! I feel like this is a very geocaching-adjacent idea; the geocaching community might be a good place to bounce ideas around to get a project like this started.
Also mapillary.com :)
I know you’re asking for a single place to go, which isn’t going to happen until “modern” places that were captured by Google and the like turn into the old places. Sometimes you can dig into old archives and find pieces of things that were digitized. Put enough of them together and you might get some answers. It’s difficult and very regional dependent on what was done over the decades. Just finding an online copy of old highway maps is a challenge, and I figured that would be easy. But if you can find some sources, it’s fascinating to try and overlay old and new and see just how much has (and hasn’t) changed. I’ve found old roads in my area that were cut up by newer and by lots of development, but are still there, just not connected in the same way.
This any good for you?
Very clunky on mobile and a bit unintuitive but I think it’ll work
