Originally published at: Fun game makes you guess what year a photo was taken | Boing Boing
…
2 Likes
It is fun but frustrating. I mean if I’m within 5 years I call that a win but the scoring certainly does not.
3 Likes
Huh, seems like my biggest issue is that photographs taken after the late/mid-90s all look the same to me. Pre-1915 photos without cars are hard for me to place within a few years, but I can’t seem to tell the difference between 1997 and 2017, much less detecting differences in anything after 2007. I’m sure there are subtle differences in the visual quality of cameras over that time I’m missing, but the clothes people are wearing could come from any year in that time, and there’s no visible cars (not that I recognize model years), so there’s nothing to latch onto.
Yeah, that’s kind of nuts - there’s often going to be zero difference between pictures taken five years apart, especially if no recent cars (or short-lived fashion fads) are in the picture, nor are there any references to current events (the few images I got exactly right: a march with a sign about Kent State, someone playing a Nintendo game). You’re otherwise only going to guess the right year by pure luck. (Heck, you’re only going to get within a few years by pure luck most of the time.)
I guess the issue is that for some decades, there are significant differences in styles, cars, photographic quality, etc. that make a relatively small difference in years detectable, but for other decades, there really aren’t those kinds of differences. (And fashions change at inconsistent rates, too, depending on place - one photo of people with extremely '70s haircuts and clothing was from the '80s… Photos of older people may involve clothing and hairstyles they’ve had for 10 or 20 years, as well.) But even at times when things were changing a lot - and those changes are visible in the pictures, a five year window does seem too limiting.
2 Likes
The first photo I got showed Boy Scouts in uniform.
I guessed 1950 and the answer was 1935.
Second photo: soldiers in uniform. I thought 1910, decided that was probably too late, tried 1905, and it turned out that my first thought was exactly right,
Third photo: a basketball match with a sign reading “1997 NBA FINALS”. Clearly nobody has weeded out the easy ones.
Fourth photo: a Russian APC in a destroyed city. I guessed 2022, it was 1996 (presumably in Chechnya).
Fifth photo: movie theatre showing the 1924 film Girl Shy.
3 Likes
3412 here. Learned the hard way that a scene where no one in the crowd is looking down (at all) at cell phones does not signify 1980, but (correct year) 2000. Who knew?!
2 Likes
Hairstyles on ladies can usually place you within 10 years. Clothing choices are about the same, but some styles have very clear cutoff dates (ladies fashions with Edwardian waists basically stopped in 1912). Technology, such as automobile types, whether phones are present, game systems. Military uniforms and vehicles can be placed pretty precisely. Hat styles on men are a good tell (style, hatbands, whether they are worn at all). The types of products on sale and their prices.
6 Likes
I saw one of a Russian train station with a few people standing on the platform. By the coats and hair and shabbiness of the station, I guessed 1995. It was 1922. 
4 Likes
Or the impossible ones. There’s such a huge variety in terms of how chronologically specific the pictures are - some effectively have the date right on them, others have no indicators of when they could have been taken. Boy Scout uniforms went ten or twenty years without changing, so that’s not going to tell you enough. I got one that was a street scene of a Chinatown somewhere - there were no vehicles and all the figures were too small and blobby to resolve. The only real indicator was the image quality, which put it in the early 1900s, but there were too many variables for that to indicate anything specific.
If someone went through the pictures and actually made some editorial decisions about inclusion, it could actually be a game where the outcome wasn’t basically random chance…
1 Like
I got three of five with personal computers in the photos that enabled me to get within a couple years each time.
4 Likes
That was literally me on one, in which a german city had some english signage. I figured must be post WWII, nope, 1905.
2 Likes
And this is thrown off by how a well done pro photo from 1905 might look better than a consumer grade camera snapshot from the 1960s.
I also find it interesting that one thing that makes it difficult is the geographic variety, in that fashions even within one country are not uniformly simultaneous and more so worldwide. Something that was fashionable in a major cultural center could take decades to spread out to rural communities. And then there are the people whose houses are basically frozen in time.
Oh, and I’ve discovered that soldiers in rubble from WWI look a lot like soldiers in rubble from WWII and vice versa. I’m sure there are identifiers in the style of uniforms, but I’m not that much of a war geek.
ETA but all in all a great little history dive I’m sure I’ll be coming back to this every once in a while.
2 Likes
Yeah, the quality of a 1905 photograph was going to vary quite a bit, plus a big part of what dates a photo that old will be signs of the media itself aging, and how well it was preserved would also vary enormously.
US army uniforms did change quite a bit between the first and second world wars, so that could be used to date a picture - but military uniforms of different countries look quite similar, so you’d have to know you were looking at Americans for that to be useful… (it showed me a picture of US soldiers wearing WWII style uniforms in a '40s Jeep - which would seem to firmly date it, but I couldn’t shake the suspicion that it was taken early in the Korean war - which based on the date, I think it was).
1 Like
In the pictures feom the early 1900s the photo film was blue-sensitive, so people with blue eyes had freakish bright eyes in the photos. This film was used less and less in the 1920s. Another indicator.
3 Likes
Although photographs of that era routinely got manual touch-ups after printing, and things like that often got fixed, so it’s not necessarily going to be visible in the picture (even assuming people with blue eyes got photographed).
1 Like
I just scored 4193, I got 4 dead on but I cheated.
One was a photo of some people raising money for Titanic relief so I googled the date, one was a Trans World plane crash, I googled that one. The third photo had a '67 Mustang in the frame, and the fourth one was a lucky guess.
Fun game.
This topic was automatically closed after 5 days. New replies are no longer allowed.
