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.
Doesn’t Maps or Google Earth have a time-line for places now? Thought it started 4 or 5 years ago, so it’s not everywhere yet.
Though I think that’s just fairly recent images and such. Maybe it permits us submitting really old info/photos?
You could probably set this up on a shared map, getting people to help/contribute/not be a troll would be the challenge.
Yep, when in street view you can look at old street views. It’ll be cool in 20 years when the changes will be more apparent
