New York then and now

Paul Hagon, a web developer at the National Library of Australia has created a fascinating mash-up of Google street view and photographs from the collection of New York Public Library. You can see the mash-up here


Here's what he has to say about it: I’ve been playing around with yet another Flickr Commons then and now project, this time using the images of New York from 1935-1938 from the New York Public Library. The process for this has been a little bit different to the previous then and now demonstrations. The images that have been posted don’t have any geo-location metadata (a latitude or longitude) so they can’t be placed directly on a map in the same manner as other Commons photographs. What they do have instead, is very good street addresses in their titles.

The google maps API has geocoding API call that translates a human readable address into a latitude and longitude. So if we pass the title of a photo into the API - let’s say “Willow Street, No. 113, Brooklyn”, it returns the latitude and longitude of “40.6978614, -73.9955804″.