this post was submitted on 16 Jun 2024
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Showerthoughts

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A "Showerthought" is a simple term used to describe the thoughts that pop into your head while you're doing everyday things like taking a shower, driving, or just daydreaming. The best ones are thoughts that many people can relate to and they find something funny or interesting in regular stuff.

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I wish there was a website where people can upload and view historic photos of roads and places on a map UI (lemmy.cafe)
submitted 2 months ago by solinus@lemmy.cafe to c/showerthoughts@lemmy.world
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Sometimes I go past an old looking building or see some traces of old signage on a store and wonder what they used to be, especially when those traces are hard to read or obscured.

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[–] andrewrgross@slrpnk.net 1 points 2 months ago* (last edited 2 months ago)

I have good news: It exists! http://retrographer.org/

A lot of them are unrecognizable, but here's an example of a good one: http://retrographer.org/photos/4215

The bad news is that's a bit limited. It was the senior project of a CMU student in 2010. It only exists for Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania. If you wanted to make one for another city, though, I think you could contact the creator, ask for the code, and then recruit people to get a ton of photos from another city's historical institutions, and then crowdsource geotagging them (which is what the guy did).

http://retrographer.org/learnMore

[–] DarkShaggy@lemmy.world 0 points 2 months ago (1 children)

This should be a Google maps feature, how cool would that be.

[–] BearOfaTime@lemm.ee 0 points 2 months ago* (last edited 2 months ago) (1 children)

Doesn't Maps or Google Earth have a time-line for places now? Thought it started 4 or 5 years ago, so it's not everywhere yet.

Though I think that's just fairly recent images and such. Maybe it permits us submitting really old info/photos?

You could probably set this up on a shared map, getting people to help/contribute/not be a troll would be the challenge.

[–] 200ok@lemmy.world 0 points 2 months ago (1 children)

Yep, when in street view you can look at old street views. It'll be cool in 20 years when the changes will be more apparent

[–] nerdovic@feddit.de 0 points 2 months ago

On Google earth pro you can also look at older versions of the satellite maps, which is also very cool