Mapping All Our Yesterdays

If you want to take a trip through the history of Richmond, Virginia, Yesterdays is a wonderful place to start. This interactive map brings together thousands of historical photographs and pins them to the places where they were taken.

You can simply browse the map and see what photographs have been recorded in different parts of Richmond, or search the collection by date, subject and other data. For example you can set the timeline control to just view photographs of Richmond taken in the 19th Century. The result is a wonderfully addictive way to explore Richmond - one photograph, street and neighbourhood at a time.

What makes Yesterdays particularly interesting is that it isn't simply a map of old photographs. It is also a collaborative platform for georeferencing historical images. Users can help identify where photographs were taken, add information about what they depict and improve the geographical data behind the collection.

And the Richmond community has clearly embraced it. According to the project's developers, Yesterdays attracts more than 1,000 unique visitors a month from Richmond's Reddit community alone. Its local focus is an important part of that success. The homepage features photographs from Richmond, the map initially centres on the city, local institutions provide many of the collections, and contributors are likely to encounter photographs of places they recognise.

But Richmond is only the beginning. Yesterdays is actually a platform for creating locally focused historical-photo maps, that can be used in other cities. It is already being introduced in other parts of the United States. There is a Yesterdays Inland Empire, and other communities and institutions are currently exploring ways of bringing their own photographic collections to the platform.

This seems like a particularly promising model for a vintage photo mapping project. Historical photographs are inherently local: a picture of an ordinary street, shop or building may be of little interest to someone on the other side of the country, but fascinating to somebody who lives around the corner. Yesterdays' approach recognises that local knowledge is also one of its greatest assets. Someone who recognises a building or remembers how a neighbourhood used to look is much more likely to be able to help identify and locate an old photograph and contribute their own photos to the map. The project is also deliberately open to contributions from local libraries, museums and other institutions.