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Comment by ghaff | Hacker News Reader

I often wish I could see a "Streetview" from 10, 20, 30, 40, etc. years ago. It would be interesting not only in cities, but even to see how areas outside of cities morphed over time. Of course there are examples but, especially when taking a photo cost real money, there wasn't a lot of systematic documentation of mundane street scenes.

There are some examples here from NYC http://petapixel.com/2014/04/04/pictures-ny-storefronts-docu... but this sort of thing is uncommon.

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There's a book of John Wesley Powell expedition photos down the Colorado River in 1869, the first time it had been explored through Cataract, Glen, and Grand Canyons. The authors returned a century later to retake the same photos from the exact same vantage points. It appears there are quite a few then and now books available for various other interesting places in the world.

But yes, Street View for the past would be amazing. Maybe a few photogenic cities like London or Paris could organize enough period photos to build a pretty good approximation. Would make a nice History thesis project to organize all the available findable photos for a neighborhood at a particular time.

The book is called _In_The_Footsteps_Of_John_Wesley_Powell_ by Stephens, Shoemaker, and Powell. It appears to be out of print but good libraries should have it and there are used copies online. [0]

[0] http://www.abebooks.com/servlet/SearchResults?isbn=&an=steph...

I managed to construct something similar as a Google Map of Haiphong, Vietnam, a few years ago, based on images collected from scanned postcards of the French colonial era. https://www.google.com.hk/maps/@20.8611143,106.6734063,15z/d...

I don't see any images when I click the markers.

Probably bitrot.

Same here. The Norwegian site Finn.no has the closest thing I've found, adding released public aerial photos to their map service every now and then. For an example, go to http://kart.finn.no/, find a city and look at the menu node called "Historiske".

http://www.oldsf.org/ is the closest thing I've seen — designer and developer mapped photos to their relatively accurate location, filterable by year. I've actually been able to find photos of two of the houses/blocks where I've lived (Mission and Lower Haight neighborhoods) dating back 50-100 years.

The optimist in me hopes that Google (or other companies) will archive old streetview data and make it available as a true visual timeline over the next few decades.

You may be interested in these photos by Camilo José Vergara, where he took pictures of the same building or street over a span of decades:

http://www.messynessychic.com/2016/10/26/for-over-40-years-t...

Not quite the same detail but with Google Earth you can review historical maps of many cities. In the View menu > Historical Imagery. You can see back to 1943 around Europe - Rome, Naples and Bologna in Italy, Lyon, Bordeaux and Paris in France as well as most major German cities. In the US it's a mixed bag but often until the 50s/70s.

street view in google maps has a timeline, in some places almost up to a decade.

https://googleblog.blogspot.com/2014/04/go-back-in-time-with...

Aha! I remembered seeing something a year or so back but thought it was just a proof of concept by an individual, not officially baked into Google Maps. Just took a look and it's definitely there, though unless you know where to look it's a bit buried in the interface.

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