11 ms·
Which year: guess which year each photo was taken
- pieterr 1y agoWhen I press "All Times Stats", I see "Games Played: 2". But I only played today. Off-by-one error?
- frogarden 1y ago4902, 2% off. I like how you've created a guess distribution
- MisterBastahrd 1y ago7.2 years off on average. First 3 were 3, 1, and 1 year off respectively. Last two blew my momentum.
- pekim 1y agoThat was fun. I got a score of 4174, and an average of 6.2 years off. Clothes and hair styles were quite helpful in 3 of the pictures. I'll definitely take a look at it tomorrow.
- Jolter 1y agoThis is exactly the same game as chronophoto.app, as far as I can tell, except with way better UX and as a “daily challenge” type game. Well done, anyway! It’s a fun game.
- fsargent 1y agoNow is there anything which will take this, run it through ML and then find a date for all of my scanned family photos?
- codecutter 1y agoThis is really fun. My score was 4307 (top 12%) with average 5.8 years off.
- peripitea 1y agoTried plugging it into the new o3 model out of curiosity and it got 0.2, i.e. it got everything exactly right save for one that it missed by a year.
- delusional 1y agoYou know, there are easier ways to cheat at the game? The photos are from the internet, a reverse image search will surface all of them.
- mr_mitm 1y agoI read it as more of an experiment to gauge the capabilities of AI than an attempt at cheating. I'm impressed that AI is that good.
- codetrotter 1y agoIs it good, or are those photos already in the training data that the model was trained on? Would be interesting to see how well it would fare on five photos from different years, using pictures that have never previously been uploaded anywhere.
- calmoo 1y agoI would bet it would still do well. You can give a frontier LLM photos that it has never seen before and it will reason about them incredibly accurately, since is is trained on, well, a lot of other similar photos. You can easily try it yourself, give o3 a photo you have taken yourself of a random place, it will crop, zoom and analyze different sections of the photo until it gets most of the time the exact coordinates of where the photo was taken.
- codetrotter 1y ago> it will crop, zoom and analyze different sections of the photo until it gets most of the time the exact coordinates of where the photo was taken. I will give it a try myself too. But all my photos that I take with my iPhone have date and GPS location embedded in the metadata so I will first have to transfer the pictures to my computer and strip them of metadata.
- nurina 1y agoThis was fun
- meatjuice 1y agoVery fun, but I'm horrible at this WhichYear 4/20/25 3045 pts 13 avg. years off 4⃣ whichyr.com
- Einenlum 1y agoI love it. Just too bad you can't zoom in the picture on mobile. Had to open the picture on a new tab.
- jjbinx007 1y agoI could zoom in okay on Chrome for Android but I always enable zoom override in accessibility so it might be that.
- jonwinstanley 1y agoI pinched the page and it zoomed ok
- rasso 1y agoZooming in worked for me in Arc on iPhone
- usr1106 1y agoUsability on mobile Firefox was not great.
- szenrom 1y agoIn Firefox, you can now go into Accessibility options and enable zooming on all sites which should help, it did for me.
- pngeez 1y agoThis is great to know, thanks! Will hopefully have it working for tomorrow's challenge.
- Einenlum 1y ago(I used Brave on Android)
- pndy 1y agoI've got 4861 (top 2% ~3 years off) If someone likes additional challenge then Teuteuf Games' WhenTaken has both guessing the year and location: https://teuteuf.fr/ https://teuteuf.fr/ They also got Worldle which was covered on hn - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=30367906 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=30367906
- me_bx 1y agoYes, the extra challenge of having to guess the place really adds some fun in WhenTaken. Direct link to it: https://whentaken.com/game https://whentaken.com/game
- uxcolumbo 1y agoFun game. Suggestions: Make the logo clickable so it goes to the homepage On the sharing stats page, add a link to start the game, e.g. if I send the link to someone to challenge my score, there needs to be an easy way to start the game.
- j1elo 1y agoWhat do the last emoji numbers mean when you share your results? Below my points, and how many avg years off, I got a dartboard, then "6", "3", emoji of a blind man walking, then "6".
- tetha 1y agoI think those indicate how far off that guess was. I have a dartboard when I guessed the year exactly right, numbers 1 and 3 matching these years off, and a blind man for >10 years off or around there.
- j1elo 1y agoYes, I confirmed it with the results from other friends. Very unintuitive, though. Just saying "Accuracy:" before the emojis, would give a good enough hint of what those mean.
- aweiher 1y agoUsing the blind man with probing cane emoji to signify losing in a game is really disappointing
- deleted 1y ago[deleted]
- redbell 1y agoThat was fun and definitely a bit challenging to figure out—I scored 3677, landing in the top 46%, with an average of 9.2 years. As for some (hopefully constructive) feedback: I think the year selection slider could benefit from a few adjustments. If an image is from the distant past—say, pre-1950s—it might make more sense to use decade-based precision rather than individual years. For example, a black-and-white photo had me way off that caused me to lose 20 years of my life :). It would be helpful if such images were categorized more broadly, something like “191x”. For mid-century images (roughly 1960–1990), a 5-year interval could strike a better balance. I came across one from that era and was six years off. And for more recent images, say post-2010, a one-year precision feels reasonable. Of course, this suggestion mainly applies if we're deducing the year based on visual cues like clothing, hairstyles, and the environment. If the game is intended more as a quiz based on the text descriptions under the images, then it shifts more into trivia territory—and that’s a different type of challenge altogether.
- dmos62 1y agoThe score takes the magnitude of error into account. Isn't it nice that guessing the precise year is more rewarded than guessing the decade?
- pngeez 1y agoHi, I made this game. Really appreciate the feedback! Seems like older images tend to be frustrating, so I think I'll use them less going forward. Also, older photos are scored more generously, so being a few decades off won’t tank your score nearly as much as it would on a newer one.
- frereubu 1y agoThis is fun. One tiny bit of UI feedback - when maximising the image, I'd expect the escape key to go back to the game, and found it a bit frustrating when it didn't.
- Al-Khwarizmi 1y agoFor the record, I especially enjoyed the older photos. Maybe it's just a matter of making it obvious in the UI that they penalize less, so that score maximizers won't be annoyed with them.
- satiric 1y ago4878, avg 2.4 years off. Way better than I thought I'd do, I think I just got lucky. I agree that it's a lot like chronophoto.app, but that also has freeplay. This has a nicer looking UI but I think a worse feature set. In particular the scroll-to-zoom and freeplay on chronophoto are nice to have. Edit: I had seen the photo in the subway before, or something very similar. It's an interesting decision to use photos from big events that people might recognize. (Not inherently bad IMO, just not what I would have intuitively chosen)
- pngeez 1y agoThanks! This is all super helpful. I’m hoping to have something like Chronophoto’s zoom working by tomorrow’s game, and a freeplay-style mode is in the works too. Do you think it's more satisfying to guess based on clues like tech, clothing, and photo quality, or when you recognize the historical event or era (assuming it’s something a little less recognizable than that subway photo)?
- satiric 1y agoI think both are good, it's nice to have variety. It was very satisfying as a user to think that the photo of all the people might be of the Egyptian revolution in 2011, then end up getting the year exactly right. Some photos are inherently gonna be easier to tell than others. Wartime photos can have a fun game of "figure out which war it is based on the equipment". I think the problem with the subway photo is that it's a very memorable situation, to use subway tunnels as shelters. But there are plenty of wartime photos that aren't gonna be that way. I also like trying to figure out where the photo was taken, even if that isn't strictly part of the game. So I'm glad that the photo caption is there.
- atoav 1y agoA fun (hard) addition to that would be the color photography by Sergey Prokusin-Gorsky because the picture quality is so out of its time (~1900) https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sergey_Prokudin-Gorsky#Gallery https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sergey_Prokudin-Gorsky#Galle...
- pyfon 1y agoOof what! They are like a modern phone camera almost. Much better than 80s film cameras. A lot of work must have gone into that.
- kzrdude 1y agoThanks, got very lucky in the sense that they were recognizable events mostly, except the ladies on the beach, so was 1.2 years off.
- dmos62 1y agoAgreed. The beach goers threw me too. (Spoiler) I was off by 20 years.
- cs02rm0 1y agoLikewise, 29 years out for that, everything else within a couple of years. Probably didn't help that I'm not American so the cultural references aren't there.
- deleted 1y ago[deleted]
- telesilla 1y agoAs someone with interest in fashion and social politics, I got that photo year within 2 years difference. Many photos here are largely identifiable as political events but certainly helps to have a fashion background as others have commented in this thread.
- djmips 1y agoI did OK, didn't try to hard but was surprised at how good people are at this!
- pembrook 1y agoGreat idea! The trick is to zoom into peoples clothing, and then the associated event becomes quite obvious. Eg. Photo of Disco, no crazy lapels, obviously towards the end of disco, which puts you within a year or two. Might have gotten lucky but zooming in on clothing got me to 1.8 years off on average (top 2%).
- david-gpu 1y agoPinch to zoom didn't work for me on Firefox for Android, and neither did double tapping.
- nly 1y agoMe either. Squinting at it didn't help.
- SlackSabbath 1y agoSettings > Accessibility > Zoom on all websites
- exhilaration 1y agoThanks!!!
- qw 1y agoIt doesn't work for me either (Android+Chrome)
- janwillemb 1y agoLong press the picture, open image in new tab. Then you can zoom.
- fooker 1y agoYeah Firefox has trouble with a decent fraction of web apps nowadays. Not their fault of course, with people not testing with Firefox.
- Jensson 1y ago
- alcover 1y ago4920 here. Waiting for contenders ;) More seriously I often wonder how this works in the brain when there is no obvious historical clue. Is it akin to guessing a numerical quantity (like when seeing a crowd) ?
- ratatoskrt 1y agoVery clever idea! This was fun!
- TrackerFF 1y agoOne interesting observation is how much less variation there has been in clothes for the past 20 years or so. Someone from 2005 could look completely undisguisable from someone today, by just wearing regular non-fashion forward 2005 clothes. Same goes for haircuts. Same can't really said about someone from 1955 and 1975, 1980 - 2000, etc. edit: Score 4695 Avg. Years Off 3.0
- 2mlWQbCK 1y agoIs that really true? It is true for me, but I always assumed that is just because I were younger last century. In 1990 I could easily tell if someone was looking like 1980, but today I could never guess if someone looked like 2015 or 2025. I would be happy to learn that this is because fashion actually slowed down, but until proven wrong I will just assume it is because I am older and not paying attention.
- Jensson 1y ago> could never guess if someone looked like 2015 or 2025. If you don't think the younger generation dress crazily then fashion didn't change. Every previous generation thought the next generations clothes were crazy.
- simgt 1y ago> I could never guess if someone looked like 2015 or 2025 It's the length of the socks
- deleted 1y ago[deleted]
- gblargg 1y agoI wanted to play more but couldn't find any way. Refresh page, no new game link, tried entering URL again. Checked but no cookies to delete. That's one way to ensure I never visit the site again.
- k1kingy 1y agoTo be fair it's a daily challenge. Try again tomorrow. But yes, I would love it if there were more game modes (similar to GeoGuessr)
- gblargg 1y agoI like things I can improve my skill on. This works by getting a stream of feedback as I study what I did and the errors I made, then try again with changes. Having only 5 rounds a day (assuming it resets each day) greatly limits this. This limitation seems more like an attempt to make me use it in a certain way (make it part of my daily routine). That's off-putting. I wanted to sit there grinding over dozens of photos and watching my skill improve in real-time.
- pngeez 1y agoHi, I made the game. Appreciate the feedback! Working on a mode that lets you play more right now.
- gblargg 1y agoSorry for being so hard on it. I looked at the intro page again and see now that it's not what I was thinking, where you have a large database of good photos with known dates it can choose from, instead each day your curate (I assume) a few photos for everyone to try and compare results (for the same photos). So it's not just a matter of letting someone play again, because currently they would get the same five photos. I took it to be something like the classic "Am I hot or not?" with a database of tons of photos.
- psittacus 1y agoThere's a similar game, but for guessing both the year and the location https://timeguessr.com/ https://timeguessr.com/ Discussed on HN a couple of years ago too: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=37203511 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=37203511 edit: found another game like OP in the linked thread https://www.chronophoto.app/game.html https://www.chronophoto.app/game.html
- clippyplz 1y agoAnother for year + location https://whentaken.com/ https://whentaken.com/
- 8organicbits 1y agoThe whole collection is great: https://whentaken.com/teuteuf-games https://whentaken.com/teuteuf-games
- kentimental 1y agohttps://pointguessr.com https://pointguessr.com is another one, it's like timeguessr but with real-time co-op functionality
- airstrike 1y agoHoly, I was off by 7 years and 427km on my first guess and I don't want to play anymore because I've surely peaked
- kQq9oHeAz6wLLS 1y agoI just got one that was off by 2 years and 24.2 meters, but it was kinda cheaty because it showed Barbara Bush on the South lawn of the White House.
- airstrike 1y agolol nicely done I only immigrated to the US in my adult life and I can't say I recognize Barbara Bush at a glance, so I was _also_ off by a few years and a few km on that one :( but still a lot of fun!
- rubychill 1y agoThis was fun! Sent it through to my "gamedle" group chat and it's probably going into my daily rotation. One thing though, the url in the share text doesn't start with https:// https:// so it doesn't turn into a clickable link when posted in some chat clients.
- tiberius_p 1y agoThis is a great way to gather labeled training data for a neural network that can guess in which year a photo was taken.
- krisoft 1y agoA photo archive with actual correct date labels is even better (the thing which this game is built on.)
- ChrisNorstrom 1y agoHere's another one for guessing ethnicities https://hbd.gg/play/ https://hbd.gg/play/
- 8474_s 1y agoThis is interesting concept, if there was more variety it could be some like timeguessr.
- NehalNetha 1y agowould be so fun if it has a multiplayer mode
- sudofoo 1y agoThis was fun!
- jillesvangurp 1y agoNice idea. I was 6 years off on average. Probably something the new AI models might be very good at.
- xg15 1y agoI guess I'm getting a bit paranoid, but whenever I see a game like this, my first suspicion is that it's just a trainset annotation UI in disguise.
- rightbyte 1y agoNah seems like pictures choosen for this purpose? Or do you mean they will sneak in a picture with an unknown date every now and then to good estimators?
- xg15 1y agoSomething like this, pretty much.
- asdf12341 1y agoI doubt why they need to, these photos are all from newspaper which already have the date.
- xg15 1y agoEh, we already had a discussion a few days ago about people using AI to effortlessly geolocate photos. That's the "where". I could see a model that also provides the "when" as useful for a lot of purposes.
- ashish1dev 1y agoTried this, it is very addictive game, good job team !
- ashish1dev 1y agotried this game, it is very addictive, good job team !
- dbcooper 1y agoWhichYear 4/20/25 4939 pts (top 1%) 1⃣ avg. years off 2⃣ 1⃣ 1⃣ 1⃣ 1⃣ whichyr.com
- thih9 1y agoDoes it have only one set of photos per day?
- rimbo789 1y agoWhichYear 4/20/25 4215 pts (top 17%) 6⃣ avg. years off 3⃣ 1⃣ 8⃣ whichyr.com
- eqvinox 1y agoIf you grab statistics per photo rather than the whole thing, and maybe do rough client geolocation, you can turn this into a sociological study and publish a paper about it…
- Vinonasg 1y agoGuessing the year each photo was taken can be surprisingly accurate when you observe changes in technology, fashion, or even product developments visible in the background.
- aulisius 1y ago3121 pts, 14 avg. years off. Decent try considering most of the options were USA specific.
- rafram 1y agoDefinitely the most polished game of this sort that I’ve seen. Nice work!
- goldfishgold 1y agoI created a similar game a few years ago for guessing the year of an object in the Met’s collection. Would love any feedback if people want to try it.
- b112 1y agoI tried playing again, but how?! I am presented with the last play stats, but see no way to play again. I can share, or get all time stats. That's all.
- davidfdriscoll 1y agoI created a similar game a couple years ago for guessing the year of an object in the Met’s collection. Would love any feedback if people want to try it. https://davidfdriscoll.github.io/met-chronoguesser/ https://davidfdriscoll.github.io/met-chronoguesser/
- Waterluvian 1y agoI love this idea so much and would make this one of my daily games. FWIW: The jankiness of the slider feels quite jarring, given it’s the sole interactive element. It makes the thing difficult to stick with. On my iPhone 12, it lags way behind and the numbers update at like 10fps. I really hope this keeps getting daily images added.
- kwertyoowiyop 1y agoAlso laggy on my iPad Air.
- pyfon 1y ago4580. Helps if you recognise the current affairs. Gay marriage, Arab spring, London Blitz came up. Leaving me with a party with a mix of drab and 70s disco clothing so I guessed 1981 and was close enough! The one that got me was some people at a beach in black and white.
- huevosabio 1y agoI recognized the Arab spring and the London blitz. The gay marriage one I couldn't put a date, but noticed a flip phone on the picture so I just guessed the highest number before iPhone release year and wasn't too bad. The disco scene was clearly a 70s Pic so I just guessed smack in the middle of the decade. The beach black and white I was the most off. I faintly remember that it was a big discussion point during the 20s that women should be allowed to wear "revealing" swimsuits,so again I went for a year in the decade. I was off
- rsync 1y agoScore 4753 Top 2% Avg. Years Off. 3.0 I didn't really recognize any of the current events - or anything at all - I just ... kind of knew ... In fact, it had less to do with the actual content of the photo than the qualities of the photo itself ... I sort of felt like photos looked like that around 1990 ... and I was right.
- jpalomaki 1y agoThe "global score distribution" (and my score) and the end was pretty good idea. Much more informative than just some high score list.
- johnsillings 1y agoAgree – great feature & nice for sharing.
- GaryRGruberPhD 1y agoI wish it had distributions for each picture
- curtisszmania 1y ago[dead]
- hliyan 1y agoOne thing I realized was: the presence or absence of smartphones is an easy way to determine whether something happened before circa 2009 or after. Another: indoor smoking.
- johnsillings 1y agoI love this! Small bit of feedback that – after expanding an image – it'd be nice to more easily collapse it and return to the game screen. Maybe by pressing escape on the keyboard and/or clicking on the image.
- BMc2020 1y agoScore 3433 Avg. Years Off 12.2
- navigate8310 1y agoScore 4266 Avg. Years Off 5.2
- aae42 1y agoripoff of https://www.chronophoto.app https://www.chronophoto.app ? it's really fun/simple so can't feel too bad
- kelvinjps10 1y agoI feel dumb, I can't figure out how to play again
- js4ever 1y agoChatGPT 4o guessed perfectly 8 in a row!
- karaterobot 1y agoYou know, this game pretty much demonstrates how fast cell phone addiction happened. You can tell the year by how many people are staring at their phones, and how big their phones are. You don't see nearly as many people reading newspapers in old photos as there are people gormlessly staring into their phones in contemporary photos.
- hnpolicestate 1y agoI love this stuff. I was always good at guessing song, movie or photo years.
- alanvillalobos 1y agoNice game! Good UI experience. When sharing you get 4 different scores (points, top %, avg error, total error) I think. This is a little confusing, better to share one score (maybe plus total error, maybe) so people can more easily compete. 4 scores is too confusing.
- xyst 1y agogeoguessr clones/copies are so hot rn. Cool idea, m8. I ended up just looking at clothing and fashion choices. Although black and white photos do tend to represent historical era (ie, holocaust, ww2)
- deleted 1y ago[deleted]
- almosthere 1y ago5.2 years average off. The first was a dance club in the 70s, I guessed 78, but it was 79... There was one where nudists where taking off their clothes, I guessed 50s but it was 1934!!!
- xeromal 1y agoYa, I guessed the 50s too! So early!
- bijant 1y agoo3 got a SCORE AVG.4989 YEARS OFF 0.2 TOP 0%
- manbitesdog 1y agoNeat thing! I'm gonna add it to my round of daily games. I'd suggest changing "Share results" to some variation of "Copy results". Share looks like it's gonna open some sharing menu and deter people from playing (and hence promoting your game) WhichYear 4/20/25 4142 pts (top 22%) 7⃣ avg. years off 4⃣ 6⃣ 1⃣ 2⃣ https://whichyr.com https://whichyr.com
- icemelt8 1y agoScore: 4246 pts 6 avg. years off I am not american or native english speaker or never have been outside Asia
- pbhjpbhj 1y agoWhichYear 4/20/25 4311 pts 5⃣ avg. years off 6⃣ 1⃣ 5⃣ 2⃣ https://whichyr.com https://whichyr.com Wordle opens (or used to) a mock modal dialog with a copy button for sharing the results. I feel like opening the modal rather than requiring clicking the 'share' button probably leads to a lot more shares? I think I'd save a longer and just put "WhichYr.com" as the top line, bump the date and score to the next line.
- logikblok 1y agoWhichYear 4/20/25 4361 pts (top 11%) 6⃣ avg. years off 4⃣ 6⃣ 8⃣ 7⃣ 4⃣ https://whichyr.com https://whichyr.com
- wileydragonfly 1y agoStyles haven’t changed that much since jeans and a tshirt
- mNovak 1y agoFun, though I'm apparently terrible at this -- avg 14 yr off. UI note: the statistics tab shows games played: 2 when I only played once, and the lifetime points appears to be double my one game.
- nullbyte808 1y agoI have a tendency to date films and photos by their quality. Thats why I was 16 years off on the 1934 one. I got the first one exactly right, even though Im born in 1990.Some B&W cameras 80 years ago took better pictures than most cameras today.
- Bluecobra 1y agoAs an aside, this is a great website to browse old B&W photos. Some of these scans are really breathtaking. https://www.shorpy.com/ https://www.shorpy.com/
- jazoom 1y agoLooks like I also have to play "guess the timezone of the creator of this game". I enjoyed playing it yesterday. It's now 11am today and it's still not open again. I have no idea when it will be.
- pngeez 1y agoHey thanks for playing! The game resets at midnight ET. I'm working on adding a countdown to the next challenge right now. Apologies for the lack of clarity on that
- jazoom 1y agoYou don't need to apologise. You created something cool and my family enjoyed playing it.
- peripitea 1y agoHey, small bug to report: When you share your stats, the date seems to be based off local time, not the day of the test. So like here in PT, it's 4/23, but I just did tomorrow's quiz (because it releases at 9pm PT = midnight ET); the share text should say 4/24 but it still says 4/23. Or put another way, I shared two different results with my group chat today that both said 4/23.
- deleted 1y ago[deleted]
- system2 1y agoI don't understand this site's "come back tomorrow" part. Wouldn't it be better to let people play as long as they want?!
- Forgeties79 1y agoMan I am in love. The global leaderboard is inspired!
- dasefx 1y agoNot bad WhichYear 4/21/25 4864 pts (top 101%) 3⃣ avg. years off 2⃣ 3⃣ 5⃣ 3⃣ https://whichyr.com https://whichyr.com
- egberts1 1y agoPeaked bell-curve: normal No ad while using DuckDuckGo/iOS. Very clean.
- deleted 1y ago[deleted]
- dtagames 1y agoThis is fun! Thanks for the post. I got a score of 3740 and an average of 10 years off.
- darkerside 1y agoI came back and played this game again. Thought you would like to know!