Thursday, July 21, 2016

London's Historical Street View


A huge on-line collection of over 250,000 drawings, paintings and photos of London has been unveiled this week. Collage allows you to view over 250,000 images of London from the collections of the London Metropolitan Archives and Guildhall Art Gallery.

That's the good news. The bad news is that it has a really awful interactive map. The London Picture Map allows you to search the Collage image collection by location. Unfortunately the image markers take a while to load onto the map. And, because of the numbered marker clustering system, each time you zoom in on a location on the map you have to wait all over again for the markers to load.

It gets worse ... When you select a marker to view a image rather than show you the picture in an information window or in a separate page element you are redirected to the image's dedicated page on the Collage website. This means that if you want to view another image you have to go back to the map and start the painful process of waiting for the markers to load all over again.

One final warning. Each of the images on Collage has also been ruined by being digitally stamped with a large and ugly 'Collage' watermark.

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