WhatWasThere Shutting Down – A Sad Farewell
WhatWasThere Shutting Down – A Sad Farewell. I received the following email from the WhatWasThere.com website this morning:
Dear WhatWasThere User,
You are receiving this email as someone who has logged in to our historic photo website, www.whatwasthere.com, within the last 5 years.
Unfortunately, we are sad to announce that on December 15, 2023, the WhatWasThere website/platform will shut down. If desired, you can visit the Account page and download an XML file containing information about every photo you uploaded.
WhatWasThere was created in 2010 by the digital agency Enlighten (acquired in 2015) as a social good project with the goal of becoming the largest database of geographically tagged historic photographs in the world. We all believed it was a noble and worthy cause — to help capture the history of everyday places before that history disappears and is no longer available.
We did not start this project with any goal of making money and used only internal resources, both people and money, to get the platform launched. As the months and then years marched on, we realized we couldn’t dedicate adequate resources to properly maintain and evolve the platform and were never able to determine a sustainable funding/revenue model.
We know that many people and institutions found our platform useful, entertaining, educational, and addictive. As did we. I want to personally than you for investing your time, energy, and passion into building out the WhatWasThere platform. We still believe in the mission of WhatWasThere. If you know of a non-profit or other entity that would be interested in taking over the site, please contact me at sglauberman@whatwasthere.com.
Best,
–Steve Glauberman
Founder, Enlighten
I’ve been a HUGE fan of WhatWasThere ever since it debuted in 2010. The site allowed you to upload a historical photo, provide information, and then “pin” it to a map (via the Google Maps API). Once aligned, you could use a “slider” to show the current Google Street View and how it looked at the time of the historical photo.
For example, I uploaded an image of the Eastland Disaster in 1915 when over 800 Czech-Bohemian immigrants were killed when the boat capsized in the Chicago River.
For my fellow WhatWasThere users, I recommend going to My Account, exporting your content to .XML format. Then consider setting up an account at HistoryPin (https://www.historypin.org/) for a similar experience of pinning historical photos to map locations.
Currently, I could not find information on migrating the WhatWasThere content over to HistoryPin, but I’ve made an email inquiry this afternoon. I will update this post if I receive any news on a migration method.
WhatWasThere Shutting Down: About WhatWasThere
The WhatWasThere project was inspired by the realization that we could leverage technology and the connections it facilitates to provide a new human experience of time and space – a virtual time machine of sorts that allows users to navigate familiar streets as they appeared in the past.
The premise is simple: provide a platform where anyone can easily upload a photograph with two straightforward tags to provide context: Location and Year. If enough people upload enough photographs in enough places, together we will weave together a photographic history of the world (or at least any place covered by Google Maps). So wherever you are in the world, take a moment to upload a photograph and contribute to history!
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