Getting Started

Yesterdays is a place for historical photographs. These photographs come from a variety of places: libraries, museums, neighborhood associations, and more. Yesterdays shows where these photos were taken on the map, and makes it easy to search across vast collections.

Yesterdays is a crowdsourcing platform, meaning that anyone can join us in contributing georeferences, comments, and other metadata. We are glad you're here.

Example Image

Here is an example of what an image looks like on Yesterdays. If you click on in the upper right-hand corner, you'll be able to pan and zoom the image in your browser. Can you read the text on the water tower in the background? Can you spot a second water tower in the distance?

Your First Georeference

The general process of georeferencing an image can be broken down into three steps:

1. Select an image to georeference
2. Figure out where the image is located
3. Submit the georeference

Select an image to georeference

The easiest way to start georeferencing is to click "Contribute" on the Yesterdays home page. This will select a random photo from the collection that has not yet been georeferenced. By default, this will only select images that have been tagged as Easy or Medium difficulty.

Alternatively, you can click "Browse" on the home page to view the various sources of images that have been gathered on Yesterdays so far. At this point, you can click "Georeference" to dive right into a random picture from a specific source.

You can go deeper still! Within sources, you can pick specific collections or individual images to georeference. You can read more about our organization system here.

Figure out where the image is located

This is the most straightforward step, in theory. Just figure out where the picture was taken! Sometimes this will be very easy but other times it will take a bit more work. Thankfully, we have a few tools at our disposal that can help with your research.

The first clues to use are the title and description of the image. Some of them will get you at least in the general vicinity of where the picture was taken, while others will tell you exactly what you're looking at. Still others may have very little, if any information to go off of.

Sometimes other images within the same source or collection will provide some helpful context to understand where the image was taken. Knowing that this picture was taken on the 1300 block of E Cary gets you within a stone's throw, but seeing this other picture from the same collection makes clear exactly where the former picture was taken.

Another tool available to verify that you've got the right location is all of the work that's been done on Yesterdays so far! It's a lot easier to verify that the church in this picture is the same one in the background of this picture than it would be to go looking for that church today, because it doesn't exist anymore.

Try clicking on the map below to add a point georeference. This point represents where the camera was when it took the photo. Clicking again replaces your selection.

After clicking on the map, drag the joystick above to point your camera in the correct direction. You may continue to adjust the location of your point by clicking on the map again.

Please see our georeferencing documentation for more tips and tricks.

Submit the georeference

1. Choose a confidence level
2. Add any additional information to justify the placement of this image
3. Click "Submit"

Congrats, you have submitted your first georeference!