Maps Platform
Product updates, customer stories, and tips and tricks on Google Maps Platform
New life for old photos: Mapping OldNYC
Monday, July 20, 2015
Posted by Selena Salazar, Product Marketing Manager, Google Maps APIs
When Dan Vanderkam, a developer and self-confessed history lover, moved to New York in 2011, he found himself wondering what the city used to look like. He figured other people probably shared his curiosity, so he built a website,
oldnyc.org
, that overlays the city’s streets with more than 80,000 images from its past.
“I've always enjoyed historic photos because they capture so many details that you'd never write about,” Vanderkam says, guessing it’s something his father, a historian, passed down to him. “They really are a window into the past.”
Vanderkam approached Matt Knutzen, a geospatial librarian at the New York Public Library, whom he met a couple of years earlier at an event at the Google New York office.
At the time, Vanderkam was developing a website that mapped old pictures of San Francisco.
“We immediately began talking about historical photos and the possibility of overlaying images in 3D space,” Knutzen recalls.
For the San Francisco project, Vanderkam scraped photos from the San Francisco Public Library’s online archive, and only asked for permission to use them once he’d completed the site.
“I realized later how risky it was to ask them that late,” he says. “So, when I went to New York and started oldnyc, I did things differently by approaching the library first.”
Starting Work on OldNYC
Knutzen, who studied geography and cartography in college, was immediately taken with the idea and knew exactly what resources to direct Vanderkam to. He introduced Vanderkam to the Milstein division of the library, which included a collection called
Photographic Views of New York City, 1870s – 1970s
.
The images, which are mounted on brown paper, include horse-drawn carts on barely developed dirt roads in the Bronx, skaters at Central Park in 1905, and a giant alligator balloon at Columbus Circle for Macy’s Thanksgiving Parade.
On oldnyc.org, clicking on a red dot marker will open a popup box containing photos of the location sorted from the earliest date to the most recent. Some of the images are undated. The site also shows the descriptions that Vanderkam says were written on the backs of some pictures.
Luckily for Vanderkam, Knutzen had already created a metadata spreadsheet containing unique identifiers for each photo corresponding to cross street locations.
“Plugging the data into
Google Maps APIs
was made easier because I didn’t have to scrape information or hunt for street names,” said Vanderkam.
To convert the addresses to latitudes and longitudes, Vanderkam used the
Google Maps Geocoding API
.
In order to customize his map, he used the
Google Maps JavaScript API
to create location markers, and adjust hue, lightness, saturation, gamma, invert lightness, and visibility. He also specified that his map only include roads and not other elements.
Vanderkam wanted other people to be able to engage with the pictures of the city, so he used a comments API from Facebook to allow site visitors to share their personal experiences.
Teaching Computers, Engaging Communities
Getting the photos on his site was also a challenge. Some of the photos were mounted individually, but others were mounted in pairs or more. To automate the task of matching an image with the coordinates in Knutzen’s spreadsheet and then uploading it to site, Vanderkam wrote code so that the computer could recognise the brown paper and isolate the photos. This was
no simple task
. To display them, Vanderkam used an expandable image grid library that enlarges a photo when it’s clicked on. The code is published on
GitHub
by danvk.
Vanderkam also created “rotate” and “improve this transcription” buttons to encourage site visitors to correct an image’s orientation or the transcription of the descriptive text on the backs of photos.
“Oldnyc is an incredibly valuable research tool. It’s now the best way into the photo collection,” says Knutzen. “Having the information of places aligned spatially combines information to give us new knowledge to make new discoveries.”
Vanderkam doesn’t have plans to work on maps for more cities, but hopes that someone else would be interested in picking up the baton. “The code for it is all open source, so if anyone is interested in building a version for their hometown, they should get in touch,” he says.
Labels
5 Great Maps
ads
advertising
africa
Andorra
Android
App Engine
art
Australia
Autocomplete
Boston
brazil
Bruce Springsteen
Bulgaria
Campus Map
Chrome
City 24/7
Code for America
COM API
Computerlogy
creative advertising campaigns
Custom Map Types
design
developer
Developer Challenge
Developer stories
Directions API
Drawing Tools
Driving Directions
Earth
Earth API
Elevation API
environment
epungo
Estonia
Europe
Fab Friday
flash
Fusion Tables
GAE
games
GDAL
Gears
geo
Geodesic Lines
Germany
Gibraltar
GIS
Global Economy
gme
Google Analytics
Google App Engine
Google Earth
Google Earth API
Google I/O
Google Maps
Google Maps API
Google Maps Engine
Google Places API
Google Places API Developer Challenge
Google Street View API
government
Hackathon
Hamburg
heat map
heatmap
hiking
Hungary
iOS
JavaScript
jQuery
kenya
KML
Latitude API
Latvia
launch
Lithuania
local search
London
Mac
Map of the Week
maps
Maps API
Maps API for Flash
Maps Data API
Maps Zen
Marker Clusterer
Marketing
Mars
meetup
mobile
moca
modern art
More Than a Map
Morethanamap
Movies
Neighborhoods
New York City
Office Hours
Olympics
Panoramio
photos
Place Summaries
Places API
Plus
polygons
Premier
public transit
public transit layer
Python
real estate
rock
sao paulo
screencast
SketchUp
Slovakia
Slovenia
South Africa
Spain
Spatial Data Files
Static Maps API
street view
Styled Maps
Sydney
Track
traffic layer
Transportation
Tripline
Twitter
UN
United Nations
V3
Vancouver Olympics
visualizations
Volkswagen
VW
web
youtube
Archive
2018
Nov
Jul
Jun
May
Mar
Feb
2017
Nov
Jun
May
Apr
Mar
Feb
Jan
2016
Dec
Nov
Oct
Sep
Aug
Jul
Jun
May
Apr
Feb
2015
Dec
Nov
Oct
Sep
Aug
Jul
Jun
May
Apr
Mar
Feb
Jan
2014
Dec
Nov
Oct
Sep
Aug
Jul
Jun
May
Apr
Mar
Feb
2013
Dec
Nov
Oct
Sep
Aug
Jul
Jun
May
Apr
Mar
Feb
Jan
2012
Dec
Nov
Oct
Sep
Aug
Jul
Jun
May
Apr
Mar
Feb
Jan
2011
Dec
Nov
Oct
Sep
Aug
Jul
May
Apr
Mar
Feb
Jan
2010
Dec
Nov
Oct
Sep
Aug
Jul
Jun
May
Apr
Mar
Feb
Jan
2009
Dec
Nov
Oct
Sep
Aug
Jul
Jun
May
Apr
Mar
Feb
Jan
2008
Dec
Nov
Oct
Sep
Aug
Jul
Jun
May
Feed
Follow @GMapsPlatform
Follow
Google Maps Platform Website
Give us feedback in our
Product Forums
.
Follow