Photo sharing site aims to build a ‘timeline for the world’

Photo sharing sites serve many functions, from hunting for a specific image for an exact purpose, to casually browsing images of a favorite subject or landscape. Despite options to arrange photos by the “date taken” on many of these sites, we’ve never seen a sharing platform so dedicated to offering a sense of history as Vineme. Photos uploaded to Vineme can be tagged with content descriptions, locations, people’s names, and, importantly, a time specifying when the photo was taken. It is necessary to sign up in order to upload photos to the site, but this is free, and uploaded photos can then be viewed by members and non-members alike. With an ever increasing number of images already uploaded to the site, visitors can search the site by dates or keywords. For example, a search with the keyword “beach”, brings up photos of military operations in the 1940s, with the option to then scroll into the “future” and view more recent photos — of Newport Beach in 2003, for example. Alternatively it is possible to search for photos taken on a specific day, in a specific location. Vieneme, in the site’s own words “aspires to be the timeline for the world […] Through this experience we hope Vineme users can discover new connections between tags, time, places and people all over the world.” It’s certainly an engaging way to make history both local, relevant, and contextualized. (Related: User-generated site adds historical layer to Google Maps.) Spotted by: Tom Flynn