Discussed on HN a couple of years ago too: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=37203511
edit: found another game like OP in the linked thread https://www.chronophoto.app/game.html
I have to say I got almost perfect a Holy Week celebration in Sevilla in the 1920's (I'm Spanish, so only some hundred meters away but kinda wild guess for the year and only was two years off), and pointed Mexico instead of Guatemala for another, but nailed the year (1981) for a grand total of 902 out of 1000 points.
That was fun!
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!
This is a nice idea. Only issue are the ads - the ad on the bottom right is bleeding over the photo, there are two video ads playing simultaneously... Makes it annoying to play
Same can't really said about someone from 1955 and 1975, 1980 - 2000, etc.
edit: Score 4695 Avg. Years Off 3.0
1) For all its negatives, online culture makes it easier to find and acknowledge different groups with different tastes that share yours, you're not as subject to having to "fit in" just with those near you. Maybe another way to say it is that fewer things are "weird" because it's easy to find others doing something similar
2) The availability of styles is not quite as bottlenecked into a limited number of taste-makers like it used to be.
Until something new is done ;)
The sound pallette is just about infinite with what's possible.s.
I think modern music has become homogenous because true art is risky and won't pass a modern focus group.
i really liked them, was sad when they went away
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.
It's the length of the socks
2000's: jeans
2010's: leggings
2020's: not those
Considered over a longer timescale, up through the late 19th century, the principle options for clothing were cotton, flax, silk, wool, leather, grasses (in some regions), and metal, with very few other options.
Viscose rayon was the first synthetic fibre created, in 1899. It was followed by Nylon (1930s) which pressaged a slew of additional synthetics, notably polyester. Adoption was somewhat slowed by various factors, including WWII, but by the 1960s synthetic fabrics and brilliant dyes were exploding into popularity.
Flagrant use of synthetics faded somewhat through the 1970s and 1980s, with fabric blends and natural fabrics becoming more prevalent (yes, I'm aware that the leisure suit was prominent in the 1970s, but it was less so by the end of the decade).
There've been variations in specific styles since, though most to my eye have been evocative of earlier 20th-century periods since the 1990s, rather than distinctively original. (I'm far from an expert in clothing fashion, take with heaping handfuls of salt.)
Other scene-setting elements include architectural styles (notably houses in the West), automobiles, and since ~2000, the presence and style of handheld mobile devices, smartphones after about 2010. Camera styles would be a useful indicator for much of the 1900s ("Brownie" box cameras, SLRs, "Instamatics", and the like).
N.B. I'm just noting the phenomenon, not commenting on its merits
[1] https://www.vice.com/en/article/women-are-intimidating-men-w...
How is that even possible? Only three years off? I thought guessing it which tens would be good enough. Getting the last digit right is impossible without blind luck? Or am I missing something?
Round 1 I just guessed in the middle of the 70s.
Round 2 I was 5 years off, but I should have been able to get closer if I'd slowed down. Someone with a better knowledge of modern Middle Eastern uprisings or Arabic could have read the signs, but also the tech in everyone's hands was pretty closely dated.
Round 3 was pretty clearly the London Blitz—the uniform was WW2 era and people were piled on top of each other in a London Tube station—which narrowed it down to basically a single year.
Round 4 was another guess-the-decade shot, I was 6 years off (I guessed 1940). Had I thought about it harder it would have been unlikely to have been taken during WW2, which would have bumped my guess up a few years to be closer.
Round 5 was a bunch of protesters who were pretty clearly in the mid-to-late 2000s (cell phone in the background), and the topic of their protest was gay marriage which had a single very important flashpoint in that decade with Prop 8 in 2008.
Round 2 I guessed it was something to do with Arab Spring but without looking up the year of it happened I remember it was late 00s or early 10s so I put 2010.
Round 3
>and people were piled on top of each other in a London Tube station—which narrowed it down to basically a single year.
Not sure that is a knowledge I know but I only guess it was WWII, again without looking it up I only remember it as the 40s.
Round 4 I had the same thought so I guess something like 1960s because I thought it wasn't WWII.
Round 5, not from US so I only know / heard of Prop 8 when Mozilla fired their CTO Brendan Eich. I thought it happened in early to mid 2010s.
There were 2 major world events represented, that helps. Clothing style helps.
I felt like I should have been able to be closer. The images wouldn't zoom on my phone though. I'm impressed by three years off but would consider it quite possible for somone who knows their history.
Skill issue.
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.
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.
It’s probably there now, it’s the London Underground.
Might have gotten lucky but zooming in on clothing got me to 1.8 years off on average (top 2%).
Not their fault of course, with people not testing with Firefox.
> obviously towards the end of disco
What is the end of disco?
What now?
Personally, I’d prefer internet commenters argue in good faith instead of emotionally parroting 2010s social justice identity jargon. You could have responded with something op was missing about said music (interesting history, examples of artists innovating there, etc) instead and added some value to the thread.
But okay, here's another one: that same queer and black community from Chicago that definitely didn't feel great about ~50k white men burning their records developed a new (now super popular) genre on top of the ashes of disco (both metaphorically and literallly).
Its name is a reference to a nightclub in Chicago called The Warehouse (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Warehouse_(nightclub)), which was frequented primarily by gay black men in the early 1980s. People all over Chicago were looking for the type of music that was playing in the Warehouse, hence the name: 'house music. So, not only was that day in Chicago fundamental to the death of disco, but it was also fundamental to the birth of house music. The more you know!
I can respond with music from women in
* Nigeria: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=tvY31eN3gtE
* Zambia: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=H2lvgKDpiSA
* Australia: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=JLQ4by3lUJo
* The Gambia: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=PtmmlOQnTXM
and suggest there's some interesting cross cultural threading in all these examples.
Confirming this, it looks like you indeed get top 0% when you end on a perfect score of 5000 with an average of 0 years off.
I'm impressed that AI is that good.
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.
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.
The photos are of course in the training data. Most humans too, would have seen a large fraction of these photos before.
But associating it with a year is where the magic happens.
You are dismissing a technology capability that was science fiction a year or two ago.
The one that got me was some people at a beach in black and white.
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
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.
6⃣ 1⃣ 5⃣ 2⃣
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.
If someone likes additional challenge then Teuteuf Games' WhenTaken has both guessing the year and location: https://teuteuf.fr/
They also got Worldle which was covered on hn - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=30367906
One thing though, the url in the share text doesn't start with https:// so it doesn't turn into a clickable link when posted in some chat clients.
Great game though, really good idea!
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)
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)?
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.
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
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.
WhichYear 4/20/25 3045 pts 13 avg. years off
4⃣
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.
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.
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.
Decent try considering most of the options were USA specific.
Below my points, and how many avg years off, I got a dartboard, then "6", "3", emoji of a blind man walking, then "6".
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) ?
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.
4⃣ 6⃣ 8⃣ 7⃣ 4⃣
I'll definitely take a look at it tomorrow.
I can share, or get all time stats. That's all.
I am not american or native english speaker or never have been outside Asia
No ad while using DuckDuckGo/iOS.
Very clean.
I got a score of 3740 and an average of 10 years off.
it's really fun/simple so can't feel too bad
2⃣ 1⃣ 1⃣ 1⃣ 1⃣
whichyr.com
3⃣ 1⃣ 8⃣
whichyr.com
3433
Avg. Years Off
12.2
4266
Avg. Years Off
5.2
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)