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https://pastmaps.com

Been working on this as a new way to find, explore, and view old historical maps and aerials of my area. Still heavily in development but have been surprised by some early traffic stats (1-2K organic uniques / mo and growing 200%+ m/m right now)

Hoping to add in more advanced map tooling within the next week or 2, including new basemap options, 3d terrain view, and then a proper search box which I've been pushing off for far too long




That's really cool! Just wanted to share the following site as the city of Toronto created something similar a few months ago https://map.toronto.ca/torontomaps/


Amazing, just bookmarked this!


Seems like it's the same app but Calgary has this too. The maps around the time of our big flood in 2013 are pretty interesting.


This is really cool, makes me nostalgic for a lot of time georeferencing random maps from the library of congress or from municipal archives etc.

In that same vein, you could add a feature where users could contribute georeferenced map files for community review and approval--I think that would really increase your scalability. I see you have an email for that currently.


I love love love this direction. And yea, I have a basic email but I really think a super simple upload and maybe even dead-easy georeference tool for folks to contribute data is a no-brainer! I'm bumping this up on my backlog, thank you!


Amazing, can't wait to see where you end up! Let me know if you need a hand too. I love web mapping projects--I got into programming through QGIS/leaflet on the way to a couple degrees in GIS and urban planning.


I love it! A suggestion for much further down the line: a timeline on the map which composites many maps from a similar time period so you can see them all stitched together (somewhat like how https://skyvector.com/ stitches together multiple sectional charts into a continuous map, though I know it can't be as seamless). Or you could attempt to run some extra processing steps to warp the map to match the background map's projection. Those are both big undertakings, though.


Very doable, these are called mosaics in the GIS world and it's actually not that crazy to do

Really love this suggestion, I could see it making map exploration far easier since now you just need to explore by year instead of by map and by year (reducing dimensionality by 1!). Thank you, I'm going to chew on this a bit more but I really think there's something here


Your site is similar to https://www.oldmapsonline.org/

I have found the ui for map difficult to use in the past.


Yea I used to use this site quite a bit but it is clunky as all hell. I found myself cobbling together my own tools or stitching 3-5 different resources together over time for my research and this eventually just led to me starting work on Pastmaps. I'm hoping I can build something far more comprehensive, modern, and intuitive


Obviously I want to buy a high quality print of the map focused on an area.


Damn, for a second I thought this was like weedmaps but for linguini (which would be an awesome site) and then I looked a bit closer. Still cool though!


Have you thought of running super resolution on the images?


I actually think that's a great idea! I considered doing it as part of my ingestion pipeline when starting out but honestly got a bit overwhelmed with all the options so put it on my backburner. Maybe I should take another look. I think it would be an awesome way to enable even more crisp zooming


I found a map of the area around my family’s farm in 1894 super quick. Awesome site!


This is super cool, thank you for making it!




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