PastVu is an online platform for gathering, geo-tagging, attributing and discussing retro photos. A look at the history of humanity habitat.

This project was started in 2009 by Ilya Varlamov and Alexey Duk. Initially it was dedicated to historical photos of Moscow (oldmos.ru). As community was growing, soon a second site for historical photos of St. Petersburg was created (oldspb.ru). In 2013 two projects were merged and migrated into global scope platform PastVu. Principal maintainer and software architect of the new platform became Pavel Klimashkin. In 2020 the project code became open source, this attracted more people to participate and contribute. Over the years, many people have uploaded, attributed and geo-located images (photographs, paintings, drawings), with support and leading by regional and global moderators and administrators team.

The project is built using JavaScript stack containing components:

• MongoDB database and Redis for runtime data storage
• Node.js with Express web application framework at back-end
• Socket.IO provides realtime client-server communication
• Pug is a template engine
• Knockout client-side library is implementing MVVM architecture pattern
• Leaflet is used for maps display and interaction

Other dependencies can be found at package.json and public/js/lib/.

We are using GitHub tools for CI/CD pipeline and release management.

We are grateful to the PastVu users community for adding photos and discussing them, helping to identify locations, improving information accuracy, taking resposibility by moderating regions.

The are more ways one can participate in the project and make it evolve:

• Discussing the project
• Report a bug
• Propose a new feature

Before creating an issue, it might be a good idea to search if it has been reported already.

If you think you have found a security issue, please email at [email protected].

We expect all project participants to follow Contributor Code of Conduct

We welcome any keen developer in helping us build the better PastVu. See contributing guide to learn about our development process and environment setup.

• Test database used for development setup is licensed under ODbL 1.0, geographic and adminstrative boundaries data it contains: © OpenStreetMap contributors.