Monday, September 26, 2016

Time Travel Around the World


OldAms is a new website which allows you to view thousands of vintage photographs of Amsterdam on an interactive map of the city. The map geo-locates old photographs of Amsterdam from the Amsterdam City Archives.

OldAms includes a slide control which allows you to filter the photographs displayed on the map by year. This allows you to set a date range for the age of the photographs you wish to view on the map. When you select a marker on the map thumbnails of the selected image(s) are shown in the map sidebar. You can then click on these thumbnails to view a larger version of the vintage photo.


OldAms is inspired by the OldSF website. OldSF is an interactive map which allows you to browse historical photos from the San Francisco Public Library collection. OpenSFHistory has also created an interactive map of over 100,000 vintage photos of San Francisco from the Western Neighborhoods Project.

The same team behind OldSF also created OldNYC, OldNYC is a Google Map locating 80,000 historical photographs of New York from the wonderful Digital Collections of the New York Public Library.

In London you can use the Collage map to browse over 250,000 images of the city from the collections of the London Metropolitan Archives and Guildhall Art Gallery.

You can also step back in time in Norway using the Tids Maskinen (Time Machine) map. This Google Map allows you to browse vintage photos of Norway by location and date.


If your home town isn't featured in any of the above maps then you should try the Historypin map. Historypin is perhaps the most well known map of vintage photographs.

This map archive allows anyone to add historical photographs to an ever growing map of vintage photos from around the world. Because Historypin allows anyone to add historical photos to their collection they have thousands of vintage images of locations across the globe.

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