About PinPast
Five pieces of history a day. A photograph out of the archive with its caption withheld — you decide where it was and when it was.
How a round is scored
Each round is worth up to 10,000 points, split evenly between the two guesses. Five rounds make a daily, so a perfect day is 50,000.
- Location — up to 5,000
- Distance from your pin to the real place, on a gentle curve: you lose about half your location points for every 1,400 km you are off, so a guess on the right continent still scores well. Landing within 50 km adds a precision bonus on top, worth up to 500 — that last slice is the difference between “right country” and “right city”.
- Year — up to 5,000
- Distance from your year to the real one, on a much tighter curve: roughly half your year points go for every 14 years you miss by. Being a decade out costs real points; being a century out costs nearly all of them.
There is no partial credit for skipping — a skipped round scores zero and shows you the answer. Both guesses are scored on the server, so the answer is never sitting in the page waiting to be read.
The Archive
The Archive deals photographs, and reaches from the 1800s to the present day. The street, the fashion, the cars and the light are the dating clues.
A second mode, The Press Desk — dating a vintage newspaper front page with the masthead inked out — is currently offline. Our redaction was leaving city names visible in body text and advertisements, which handed players the answer. It comes back when that is rebuilt and verified page by page, not before.
Where the pictures come from
Everything in the archive is public domain, Public Domain Mark, or CC0 — no “no known copyright restrictions”, no non-commercial licences, no rights we would have to argue about. Sources include Wikimedia Commons, Europeana, the Internet Archive and national archive collections. Each round carries its provenance, and you can see the source and licence on the reveal screen after you have guessed.
Maps are rendered from OpenStreetMap data, © OpenStreetMap contributors.
Still being built
PinPast is new and the archive is still growing. Progress and streaks are stored on your device only, so they do not follow you between phone and laptop yet, and there are no accounts or global leaderboards. Both are on the list.