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Show HN: A website for exploring historical photographs of my city

yesterdays.maprva.org

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Re: Show HN: A website for exploring historical photographs of my city

#11

Post by koo5_2 »

sixtyj wrote: post #2

Awesome. Any plans to make it global? I think there is a lot of people who document (urban) landscape and would like to place their photos into map together with the view vector. OldMapsOnline has a lot of georeferenced old map layers from around the world…

I'm building such a thing at https://hillview.cz/ , the content is heavily centered around my city, but i'm open to any contributors. The whole thing started as a tool to help track down what you're looking at from views around the city. At that time, i wasn't aware of Panoramax (and a few other projects), but in the end, everything seems to be converging into one federated "geocommuns" anyway...

Re: Show HN: A website for exploring historical photographs of my city

#12

Post by byra »

Looks really cool.

Some kind of timeline view where you could scroll through years and have the map filtered to that year or date range would be super cool though.

Or even for photos tagged to pretty much the same location you could show newer and older photos of that area.

Re: Show HN: A website for exploring historical photographs of my city

#13

Post by vova_hn2 »

cyberax wrote: post #8

A similar site for photos from Ukraine, Russia, and other xUSSR countries: https://pastvu.com/p/224166

pastvu were created by people from xUSSR and most users are also from there, the data there is actually global. For example, if you navigate to Richmond, Virginia, you can see that there are more there one hundred photos available.

(default map provider is in Russian, but you can switch to OSM using selector at the top of the page)

Re: Show HN: A website for exploring historical photographs of my city

#14

Post by uneekname »

OroPla wrote: post #10

It's a bit hard to navigate and tell what you are looking at, unfortunately. But this reminds me, that my dad has an around 300gb repository of historical images and newspaper articles for the place he lives in that references events and shows images going back about a thousand years. If there was some kind of docker service to make all this data more accessible that would be great, but there doesn't seem to be anyth…

Hey OroPla, thanks for your comment. I agree I have work to do in terms of making the site more approachable to new users. I'd really value any ideas you have to that end.

Yesterdays is fully open-source, and while the production site runs in Kubernetes, the development setup in Docker Compose might meet your needs. If you ever wanted to talk through the process of running Yesterdays for your dad's collection, I'd be glad to help you with that.

Cheers!

Re: Show HN: A website for exploring historical photographs of my city

#15

Post by uneekname »

Kaikei wrote: post #4

Nice! It's like taking a stroll through the city across time. With accumulated data, tracking the city's progression from a fixed viewpoint would be even more fascinating.

That is the goal! I've been amazed at what we have uncovered on my block. Lots of unlabeled photos that end up filling in historical details of how the city has changed.

Re: Show HN: A website for exploring historical photographs of my city

#16

Post by uneekname »

byra wrote: post #12

Looks really cool. Some kind of timeline view where you could scroll through years and have the map filtered to that year or date range would be super cool though. Or even for photos tagged to pretty much the same location you could show newer and older photos of that area.

Yeah, there's a lot more I want to do in terms of date filtering. There is a timeline filter available on the map page, but I'm thinking it needs to be more intuitive. Thanks for checking out the site!

Re: Show HN: A website for exploring historical photographs of my city

#17

Post by uneekname »

raybb wrote: post #7

This is a lovely project. Were you inspired by any projects like this for other cities? I think I saw something once for NYC but it didn't have nearly as many images. Also, I'll probably share this in the next issue of https://urbanismnow.substack.com since we try to share positive things happening in cities around the world!

Yes! There are many similar projects[0] that we drew inspiration from. I hope to set Yesterdays apart in terms of our crowdsourcing toolset, tight integration with OSM and Wikidata, and the relationships we are building with libraries and museums that hold these collections.

I'll have to check out your Substack, it sounds right up my alley!

[0] https://docs.yesterdays.maprva.org/other/similar-projects/

Re: Show HN: A website for exploring historical photographs of my city

#18

Post by OroPla »

uneekname wrote: post #14
OroPla wrote: post #10

It's a bit hard to navigate and tell what you are looking at, unfortunately. But this reminds me, that my dad has an around 300gb repository of historical images and newspaper articles for the place he lives in that references events and shows images going back about a thousand years. If there was some kind of docker service to make all this data more accessible that would be great, but there doesn't seem to be anyth…

Hey OroPla, thanks for your comment. I agree I have work to do in terms of making the site more approachable to new users. I'd really value any ideas you have to that end. Yesterdays is fully open-source, and while the production site runs in Kubernetes, the development setup in Docker Compose might meet your needs. If you ever wanted to talk through the process of running Yesterdays for your dad's collection, I'd be…

That's good to know.

Years ago I ended up on a page dedicated to explaining Laws of UX which has changed my outlook on design. Rather than trying to convey what I learned back then through text, I'll point you to the source directly:

(1) https://lawsofux.com/jakobs-law/ (2) https://lawsofux.com/choice-overload/

Upon visiting the site, my initial state is one of being lost, followed by being overwhelmed where to explore first.

Going to "Browse" in the top left brings me to a page I can't make sense of, but that seem to be sources. I'd have expected sources somewhere in the footer.

Then I tried "Map", picked a random place to look at and found one picture context. That's when I originally gave up due to

(3) https://lawsofux.com/cognitive-load/

I was hoping to find myself to a place with a timeline of what a certain building looked like ten, thirty and seventy years ago, but could not find such a thing.

--------

And as something actionable:

- "Browse" shouldn't lead to sources, but be down in the footer

- homepage could have an example of something with lots of pictures and show you the change over time without even clicking anything. The map is cool, but having it below the fold (you have to scroll) is unfortunate

It would be cool to have the map at the top taking about 20% of the height above the fold and have the other 80% show per default a place with many pictures and then adapt to what you click on the map. The recent activity tab doesn't have to be there and could be after "Search" and before "Docs" in the header navigation.

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