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
On Google earth pro you can also look at older versions of the satellite maps, which is also very cool
