Introduction
PastVu is an online platform for gathering, geo-tagging, attributing and discussing retro images. A look at the history of humanity habitat.
The platform's main goal is to make historical images more accessible to a wider audience and to promote cultural heritage preservation. The platform is free to use and allows users to explore historic images at location of interest, as well as contribute images and information to the archive.
History
This project was started in 2009 by Ilya Varlamov and Alexey Duk. Initially it was dedicated to historical photos of Moscow (oldmos.ru). As community was growing, soon a second site for historical photos of St. Petersburg was created (oldsp.ru). In 2013 two projects were merged and migrated into global scope platform PastVu. Principal maintainer and software architect of the new platform became Pavel Klimashkin. In 2020 the project code became open source, this attracted more people to participate and contribute. Over the years, many people have uploaded, attributed and geo-located images (photographs, paintings, drawings), with support and leading by regional and global moderators and administrators team.
Milestones and changes
- 2009
- The first version of oldmos.ru is announced
- oldsp.ru is added as separate instance
- 2013
- Over 110k public photos
- Starting migration of oldmos/oldsp into new platform
- PastVu site and its key functionality
- First crowdfunding round
- Introduced notifications and subscriptions
- Multi-regions support - inviting volunteers to join the team of reginal moderators.
- Second crowdfunding round
- 2014
- Comments functionality improvements - more control for moderators and logging.
- Configurable watermarks
- 2015
- Photo changes history - log of all photo attributes modifications.
- Official rules were introduced - becoming more organised and transparent.
- 2016
- Paintings can be published too - added support for different type of images.
- Changes to statuses and protected storage - significant workflow improvements.
- 2017
- 500k public photos
- Navigation and filter improvements - improved usability.
- 2019
- 2020
- Project becomes Open Source - project started receiving external contributions.
- Resilience improvement - migration to containerised hosting solution
- Over 1 million public photos
- 2021
- PastVu 2.0 release - significant changes to geo data storage and handling, bringing underlying tools up to date.
- 2022
- PastVu documentation project was created
- 2023
- Informing users on current technical changes - changelog to keep users informed and get feedback.
- 2024
- Crowdfunding campaign for annual hosting cost - required amount was collected in less than 24 hours.
Team
and many contributors.
