GeoArchive is an open, free, and crowdsourced project dedicated to digitizing and geo-locating old photographs, and preserving information about them. Submissions are allowed for photographs dated before January 1, 1950.
The goal of GeoArchive is to collectively build an open, global catalog of historical photography, free from paywalls and institutional boundaries.
Anybody can contribute a photograph from any source available to them through a simple submission form. A comprehensive, filterable list of records can be found at the database. By adding coordinates, they are made visible as a marker on the map.
The GeoForum hosts various pages dedicated to promoting user activity and collaboration, including a forum, userpages, and live lists of recent contributions and top editors.
A slew of useful features assists the editing experience:
Submissions are visible on the site after a brief review period (typically under 24 hours) to prevent spam.
A single photo is treated as a "record". Multiple image files may be uploaded as different versions of a single record, reflecting minor differences between reproductions.
Records are assigned a unique, permanent identification number, visible on both its database entry and map marker.
Editing and revision histories of records are available through the database. Edits to records are immediate.
Records can be interchangeably viewed on both the database or map — on the database, click the coordinates to jump to the map; on the map, click the bracketed ID number to jump to the database.
WIP: Historical paintings or drawings of a place are supported, if known to be accurate historical depictions — these are by default disabled on the database, but visible on the map. See an example here.
WIP: A user-created tagging system may help further categorize photographs.
GeoArchive's flagship campaign, the Pre-1900 Project, intends to center efforts on digitizing 19th-century photographs. To support these efforts, the counter on the front page displays a count of submitted photographs dated prior to January 1, 1900. In addition, the database is set to filter records before this date, by default.
While efforts remain in their infancy, dedicated communication channels for those interested may be found in the forum and Discord server: https://discord.gg/94EA3ur76H.
GeoArchive operates under the following principles:
Remain Free: No paywalls. This archive operates as a crowdsourced, non-profit project.
Remain Open: With strong backend infrastructure and security measures, the archive is intended to remain accessible for generations.
Remain Reliable: A small, yet growing community helps maintain the archive, discourage abuse through penalties, and enable edit rollbacks where necessary.
Remain Collaborative: The GeoArchive is an archive built and owned by the community, and user suggestions are consistently and actively considered.
Begin contributing here.