TimeGuessr: Guess what year a photograph was taken | Hacker News Reader

TimeGuessr: Guess what year a photograph was taken

timeguessr.com

252 pointskosasbest85 comments

Open articleView on HN

It took me 4 rounds to realise the time input was a slider, as you couldn't click to type. It needs some work.

Yeah the slider really needs to be called out better, looked like part of a design notch.

Other than that, pretty fun trivia game and includes some historical content.

Holy crap, I spent way too much time trying to type text or figure out why it changed state when you clicked on it.

Same here, I had to right-click > inspect to know how the field was working :-D

Oh my God, thank you! That was infuriating. This twist on Geoguessr is an awesome concept, but that UX detail really needs a re-think.

it took me 4 rounds to realize that as well

(41,991 points!) And why does the year default to 1962?

The slider only goes back to 1900 and up to 2023 so 1962 halfway between the two?

The same game (almost) with the same slider (almost) is not at all confusing: https://www.chronophoto.app/game.html

Getting the subtle elements of a UI wrong have a profound effect.

I definitely put a pin on the coast of the UK too and it ended up somewhere in northern France after I submitted my guess.

Flat UI strikes again!

Let's learn a new control appearance for every website.

exactly the same here. bad UX

I came here for this.

On the first round I thought it was an input, then I realized it must be a slider but I tried to use it wrong. I only persisted on my second guess and realized it was actually a slider, but it didn't work how I expected.

It was really confusing that it's called timeguessr but asks me to guess the location

Agree, this is bad UI

Interesting, I didn't have a problem with that - maybe it's because my monitor is calibrated juuuust right so I can see the extremely-light-gray bar behind the red slider? Maybe making that more visible and making the slider not blend in with the red background of the year would be enough?

Surprisingly fun to analyze all the hints to guess the year - the photo quality, people's clothes/hair and other small details. Could actually be a fun party game.

I guessed a photo of mostly people to be set in Pittsburgh in the early 90s based on clothing and style. Turns out it was Alaska in 2015.

Yea, I've played the location only version of this, and was surprised how good my intuition was at guessing where different photos were taken, even without any explicit clues in the photo.

Though my first try here was a picture of a large group of people waving French Flags, wearing "'98" t shirts and celebrating under the Arc d'Trimph. Some times intuition has to do more heavy lifting then others!

Pretty fun! I played a few rounds. I'd probably bust this out at a hang out if we we were looking for something to do. I got used to the UI quirks, but thanks to other commenters I had a leg up in figuring it out. I used it on desktop btw.

Got one location that was 72 meters off. Not bad for a non-famous location.

Some of the others like raising the flag over Iwo Jima seem a bit odd though... it's more fun if you have to look at details of the photo to guess.

Wow, and I was proud to be a handful of kilometers away on one response…

Depends on the photo. I had a photo that shows military unit marching between two of the great pyramids. Much easier to figure out a location if you have such obvious landmarks.

Yeah, since then I've got a picture of Nixon in front of the white house: only 12m off.

Hah, I had a super easy one in front of the National Gallery in London - 6.3 m off :)

Amazingly, though I got the year correct as well (1973) - total guess!

Yeah, it was kind of scary when I got a photo from a non-famous location just a few kilometers away (in Europe). At first I thought this was a "prank" game where it uses IP geo-locations to present you with personal, easy to identify locations...

The Year input control is inexplicably impossible to understand how to use. It makes the game unusable. It's an interesting concept but clearly the UI needs a ton of work

left is older, right is more recent

Pretty fun twist on Geoguessr! The slider needs a bit of work and some intuitiveness on mobile but top notch otherwise. Managed to get a best score of 41,206/50,000 without looking anything up.

I can't get it to work at all. I guess it doesn't allow mobile.

Well...It does, but it is extremely unintuitive and downright painful to use on mobile.

You need to click on the slider for the year and it will jump around the years; pick something semi close to what you want -or- waste a lot of time getting it exact.

Then click on the map, it will put a pin somewhere (not where you clicked, but somewhere sorta close - within a few thousand miles), but the second click should be exactly where you click (you can safely scroll after that first click).

Then click some white space. Then scroll down, below the previous bottom (where the year selector bar was) and you'll find a submission button you need to click.

After it tells you that you were off by a few years (that you would have gotten had the inputs been more mobile-friendly) and that your distance was closer (but still pretty far off because the resolution on the map is really hard to manage on the mobile text-related zoom-levels), you can click to button (at the bottom) to go to the nest round.

Do this enough and the game ends with a fairly readable score screen.

Or in other words, yeah...broken on mobile.

Pretty fun, ~39,000/50,000. A lot of them were historical for me, such as the toppling of the Saddam Hussein statue, the Apollo moon landing trainings, and so on.

I think if you made this just about time and dropped the location part, it’s get quite addictive and greatly simplify the UI. Fun concept, keep it up!

You might wanna check out Chronophoto for just guessing the time.

https://www.chronophoto.app/

I really like the location part though.

Actually this is a timespace guesser.

The UX on a phone is quite lacking. Lots of zooming and placing the pin and picking the year with precision is difficult. How about a different type of selector for the year? Touching left and right on a solid red bar is not optimal. At least add buttons for fine control.

I got very confused on mobile, I expected to see a photo and guess a date. But instead saw a map with pin to drop under the photo, and the year 1962 pre-filled. Would love to guess the dates, but the map location part seems not true to the domain name's name.

For those who follow the Geowizard Youtube channel he has some videos playing this when it first came out:

https://youtu.be/iYjpElPF8K0?si=BkeNVmgdK4XcQObD

and then a week later:

https://youtu.be/lbP4sRWbozQ?si=U43aOYdFSRYBbrQK

Interestingly it appears the slider worked better when it first came out but was quickly changed.

That is the least mobile friendly thing. It looks neat, but sucks on a phone.

Not much better on desktop haha, still cool though. Basically a combination of

Chronophoto: https://www.chronophoto.app/game.html

Geoguessr: https://www.geoguessr.com/

There are, of course, less friendly mobile sites. But this one is terrible because it "works" in a terrible way.

39,855 / 50,000

A couple location guesses were pretty clear from the photo (like the one that had "Algiers" written on it... kinda narrowed things done).

Cute idea.

And some had the date in the photo

Same here.

I had one that had "Ice Mountain, Niagara Falls" printed on it ... couldn't be any more specific really !

Really liked the game. Think US, New York in particular is over represented, as are London and Paris and Amsterdam, but I guess you need to appeal to the expected audience.

Would be nice to see more of non-Russia eastern Europe and way more Asia/Africa. At least they didn't leave New Zealand off the map.

Holy... I tried to not cheat and look things up until it gave me a photo of a billboard saying "31st academy awards". Then I couldn't resist.

Incidentally i have to scroll right to press next round on a 13" laptop with the tab manager on the left and fonts slightly enlarged. Needs a bit of work on destop too.

Hah, speaking of web devs not testing on Firefox... guess what?

I tried it again and some images had trouble loading, but a refresh got them on. Now I've reached a point where the image doesn't load even after refreshing, going back to the front by pressing the timeguessr logo and pressing play.

Firefox of course. Some privacy plugins including ublock origin. No, not taking them off.

Would be interesting to have a similar site where you'd have to guess if an image is horizontally mirrored!

Great concept, addictive enough to keep me playing til I got a 48000!

Two points of note: 1. Some pictures repeat, even in the same game?

2. Years get rounded down to the decade in some cases? "Frank Horvat via Horvatland. A couple in Avingon train station in the late 90s. 1999 - guessed. You were 10 years off"

The location guessing part of it isn't interesting if you're using landmarks, ends up more just a case of digging around the map because you know the exact place will have an icon anyway. Think you'd have a more engaging game by removing the geoguessr element

Perhaps you get random photos because I didn't get any noticeable landmarks.

Only one the the five did not have a landmark on my set.

then you may simply prefer https://www.chronophoto.app/game.html

This reminds me to get back to a project... I've been trying to train models to tell what decade a photograph was taken, but haven't had much luck. Maybe someone else has tried that too!

This is fun.

My main complaint is the map isn't scaled correctly on mobile. I'm not sure I've ever seen that problem on any webpage since it's usually handled by the map library.

43,441 - I appreciate that the game gives you reasonably selected pictures instead of taking some historical photo collection and presenting it unfiltered.

On an unrelated note, I guess most of these photos were taken in Kodak cameras which went bankrupt and barely hanging on now. Pretty dark when you think about it.

Kodak very stubbornly denied the masd transition to digital photography.

There is still a market for horse-drawn carts, for mechanical typewriters, for 36mm film, etc, but these niches are narrow, you can't be an industry giant if you concentrate on them.

43274 on first try. Two other tries a little worse. It's quite easy when there are landmarks and people and cars; but not so easy when not.

This isn't new so a bit surprising they haven't gotten the feedback about the unclear year slider UX, but fun once you figure that out

Very cool! I love the combination of location and year. It's really crazy how useful your intuition can be.

Fun game! 38k on the first try, but I probably could have gone a bit higher had I placed the pins more accurately.

The location distance score is far too forgiving compared to the year, if I guess Taiwan, but it's actually South Korea, I still get 3000/5000 for what it almost a complete miss. The other is that there's too many famous photos that you're not really guessing and mostly recalling.

Also, it seems to occasionally try to display images from twimg.com and these don't load.

Would be nice to have a review of your scores at the end - did I do better on location or time?

40k, not too bad being on mobile ;p but I've been watching a lot of geodedective lately.

TimeGuessr #102 42,086/50,000

⬛⬛ ⬛ ⬛⬛⬛ ⬛ https://timeguessr.com

Got 24k/50k

most have words or features that give away the location, but I was way off with years!

Fun!

Very similar to a game I've recently become addicted to with a group of digital nomad friends:

geoguessr.com

I got a photo of Hitler in his military uniform standing in front of the Eiffel Tower. Couldn’t think of an easier photo to place if I tried

Damn, that was fun.

Got 40,465/50,000, I feel like I'm the geoguessr guy from twitch.

I can't believe I guessed that was the coast of Zakynthos from a photo.

38,xxx/50,000. Fun app!

Really fun little game, I averaged mid 30,000s. That year slider though...

It's kinda Fun. My score was around 24000 out of 50000.

More like timesinkrrr.com! Fun game, thank you for sharing!

GeoGuessr is for space, makes sense to make one for time!

This one is for spacetime!

can't figure out how to enter a year...

The orange bar on the bottom is a slider.

oh i was hoping this was a cli tool :(

Where do they get the data from?

Back of the photo.

Wow. Love this game.

It's almost unplayable on mobile. Really bad UX.

So addictive. Awesome idea.

41,282 suckas

Reply on news.ycombinator.com