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Great stuff! The 19th century photos you can find really add a lot of context.

I found one though that shows that back in the latter part of the 1960's you needed to be ready for any eventuality. [0] This guy, who probably just glanced at the event listing and read it all wrong, brought his own mobile bed and rolling bedroom (background with the bubblegum lights) and finds himself needing to drum up interest amongst the attendees. Not a good salesman from the expressions.

[0] https://yesterdays.maprva.org/11804/

Looks really cool.

Some kind of timeline view where you could scroll through years and have the map filtered to that year or date range would be super cool though.

Or even for photos tagged to pretty much the same location you could show newer and older photos of that area.

Yeah, there's a lot more I want to do in terms of date filtering. There is a timeline filter available on the map page, but I'm thinking it needs to be more intuitive. Thanks for checking out the site!
It's a bit hard to navigate and tell what you are looking at, unfortunately.

But this reminds me, that my dad has an around 300gb repository of historical images and newspaper articles for the place he lives in that references events and shows images going back about a thousand years. If there was some kind of docker service to make all this data more accessible that would be great, but there doesn't seem to be anything like that. Currently it's living inside digikam, so it's just a bunch of images with tags. I don't know how he managed this, but there are over a hundred thousand tags and he worked on this all alone.

Hey OroPla, thanks for your comment. I agree I have work to do in terms of making the site more approachable to new users. I'd really value any ideas you have to that end.

Yesterdays is fully open-source, and while the production site runs in Kubernetes, the development setup in Docker Compose might meet your needs. If you ever wanted to talk through the process of running Yesterdays for your dad's collection, I'd be glad to help you with that.

Cheers!

Nice! It's like taking a stroll through the city across time. With accumulated data, tracking the city's progression from a fixed viewpoint would be even more fascinating.
That is the goal! I've been amazed at what we have uncovered on my block. Lots of unlabeled photos that end up filling in historical details of how the city has changed.
This is a lovely project. Were you inspired by any projects like this for other cities? I think I saw something once for NYC but it didn't have nearly as many images.

Also, I'll probably share this in the next issue of https://urbanismnow.substack.com since we try to share positive things happening in cities around the world!

Yes! There are many similar projects[0] that we drew inspiration from. I hope to set Yesterdays apart in terms of our crowdsourcing toolset, tight integration with OSM and Wikidata, and the relationships we are building with libraries and museums that hold these collections.

I'll have to check out your Substack, it sounds right up my alley!

[0] https://docs.yesterdays.maprva.org/other/similar-projects/

Nice! there is a website with a similar concept for San Francisco: https://opensfhistory.org/maps/index.php
Awesome.

Any plans to make it global?

I think there is a lot of people who document (urban) landscape and would like to place their photos into map together with the view vector.

OldMapsOnline has a lot of georeferenced old map layers from around the world…

I'm building such a thing at https://hillview.cz/ , the content is heavily centered around my city, but i'm open to any contributors. The whole thing started as a tool to help track down what you're looking at from views around the city. At that time, i wasn't aware of Panoramax (and a few other projects), but in the end, everything seems to be converging into one federated "geocommuns" anyway...
Yes! This is on the horizon, and I have a number of groups across the U.S. who have committed to helping grow Yesterdays in their localities.

Here is the relevant GitHub issue if you'd like a peek at where this is headed:

https://github.com/MapRVA/yesterdays/issues/189

Nice project. Images are all lazy loaded but no srcset, is responsive sizing on the roadmap?
A similar site for photos from Ukraine, Russia, and other xUSSR countries: https://pastvu.com/p/224166
pastvu were created by people from xUSSR and most users are also from there, the data there is actually global. For example, if you navigate to Richmond, Virginia, you can see that there are more there one hundred photos available.

(default map provider is in Russian, but you can switch to OSM using selector at the top of the page)