Historical Photos & Street View Mashup

Then & Now

Then & Now is another entry from the MashupAustralia contest. The map is a mashup of historical photographs from Flickr and Google Maps Street View. In essence the site places historical photographs on Google Maps and shows the same location as it is now via Google's Street View imagery.

Unfortunately there are a lot of false results produced and many of the photographs end up with a 'Sorry, there is no streetview available for this location' message. However, the occasions when it does work, more than make up for the disappointment when it doesn't.

Via: @geoparadigm


I'm a great fan of these historical Google Maps mashups. Here are few of my favourite maps in a similar vein:

Tate Gallery Mapplet

The Tate have used Street View to help explore locations depicted in a special selection of their artworks. The mapplet tries to show the same view as depicted in the paintings. Part of the idea behind the mapplet is to explore how urban and rural environments have changed.

LookBackMaps

LookBackMaps is a collection of historical photographs that can be compared to the same current view as seen on Google Maps Street View.

The photographs are geotagged and displayed on a Google Map. Users of the map can select a date range for the photographs that they wish to view. To view a photograph alongside the current Street View just click on any of the pictures inside the information windows.

To add your own historical photographs to the map you just need to register with LookBackMaps.

Utrecht van Boven - historical photos of Utrecht on a Google Map
Sydney Sidetracks - a map of audio, video and photographic records of Sydney's past
HistoGrafica - historical photographs on Google Maps
Virtual Time Travel - archive film of locations. One of my own old mashups. Some of the videos may now have been removed from YouTube but there are still enough old films here to make it worth a visit.

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