Historypin service will open a window to the past

Now a quite popular genre of photography is “historical” photography ( photographers forgive me for making up my own terms, I don’t know the exact definition of this type of photograph ), when a photo taken in this place is superimposed on a photo taken many years ago. In this case, the angle is selected in such a way that it all looks like a window into the past. In general, interestingly enough, I came across such photos several times, they can be viewed very long. This week the Historypin service is launched, the purpose of which is to show all of us how certain places looked like many, many years ago.



The concept is simple - the service uses Google Maps, to which "pins" old photos. Generally speaking, the idea is very interesting. After all, not all of us saw images of the same Red Square, 20-30-50 years ago. There will be photos of Times Square dating back to 1905 and 1945. Exposing the search parameters, you can find old photos of a particular place for a certain period of time.

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Historypin is a non-profit project, and its representatives have already agreed with many historical museums, which have archival photos of different places, about cooperation. As a result, a huge number of photographs previously hidden in the archives will appear on the Web. In addition, it will be possible to upload your own photo, with a brief annotation dedicated to a specific place or people shown in the photo.







The real purpose of Historypin is to create a team of authors who will upload archived photos, of which there are quite a few of us, giving them access to other people. Already, although the service is in beta, the base of photos has tens of thousands of elements. In addition, about 20 thousand people registered on the service. So far, the project has not released a mobile application, but this is one of the main tasks of Historypin. The mobile application will allow you to go deeper into the past, simply by pointing the phone camera to a building or street.



Now the Historypin team begins to collect audio-recordings of interesting events. For example, there is already in the database audio recordings of Jimi Hendrix's performances at the Royal Albert Hall in 1969, and there are video recordings of various events.



The service promises to be very interesting, and I, most likely, will often look into it. And how do you like this idea?



Via mashable