Show HN: CityFlashback – Explore your city through historical photos
cityflashback.comHi HN
Over the last few weeks I started a small side project — partly to learn frontend development (I usually work as a backend developer in my 9-5), and partly because every time I walk around I keep wondering: “what did this place look like in the past?”
Until now I just searched for "<place> historic photos", but they rarely come with coordinates or a way to compare them with how the place looks today. So I built something like a “Wikipedia/GeoGuessr for historical images” — ideally community-maintained over time.
Right now, it’s very barebones: - an interactive map to browse the uploaded images - a simple side-by-side image comparator
It’s still an MVP with a small dataset (mainly Turin, Italy, since that’s where I live), but I plan to expand it as I have more time.
I’d love your feedback: - Does the concept sound interesting? - What features would make it more useful or fun? - Do you know of any open datasets of historical photos I could integrate?
Happy to answer any questions, and very open to suggestions
This is a cool idea! I think you need to find a way to seed more photos (are there any public archives by country/state you could use?), but I could see this being useful when traveling as a way to understand the history of a place.
Somewhat related, but made me remember Color Labs (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Color_Labs) which tried to build a social network where you could see photos taken by other people in your location.
Thank you!
Right now I'm looking for more photos, but I often find images where the historical and recent views are combined in the same frame. So I need to adjust the upload flow to make it easier to crop them into two separate images.