HistoryPin: Compare Past Landscapes of Cities using Google Street View
Ever thought how a particular corner of a city looked in the 18th century ? With time, city landscapes change a lot and it becomes impossible to recollect how a particular part of the world looked a 100 years ago.
Imagine you are sharing some recent images of your town with an elderly person. He/she might say “In 1945, the city was very different, than the way it looks now”.
Thanks to sites like HistoryPin – now you can compare the past landscape of any part of the world with it’s current view.
To be more precise, the site uses Google Maps and the Google’s street view technology to share images of streets, buildings, cities, villages and lets anyone compare them side by side. The images can be dated and geo tagged and then placed on the street view photography so that other users can explore the images over time.
For example: The following is the street view image of Cornhill, a famous city from the United Kingdom
When you click the images shown on the right, you will see nearby photos of the same place that were shot at an earlier period of time. The time range can be adjusted using the horizontal slider at the top. Think of Historypin as a digital time machine, you go back in the past and see how exactly the place looked a few decades ago.
Here are some past images of Cornhill, UK found using History Pin:
Cornhill – April 1926
Cornhill – April 1905
Cornhill – present day
To find the earlier images of any city, simply use the search box and select the year from the timeline. If any image shot at that year is available, Historypin will fetch the image and it’s locaion in Google maps as shown below
The interesting thing is the user submitted stories section, where you can read more about the shown image, the incidents and the reactions revolving around it.
If you have some old images of your town or village, you can upload it at HistoryPin and add a story. Who knows, your grandchild may search for past images of your village a few decades later.
About the project: Historypin is an initiative from Wearewhatwedo, in partnership with Google
