Comment by Soupy

Comment by Soupy 3 days ago

18 replies

View on Hacker News

"Google maps but for old maps": https://pastmaps.com

This is a solo startup that I've been working on for 2 years now. It's a labor of love and I'm very lucky and thankful that it's big enough to surprisingly pay all of our bills. Still constantly feeling FOMO over all of my startup buddies working with AI and LLMs while I plug away at old maps and GIS .

It gets ~80K MAUs and just slowly and consistently is growing organically through word of mouth through history focused communities. I'm currently playing with expanding the coverage internationally as I still only support the US which is a wickedly fun project.

tim-fan 3 days ago

Hey, cool to see!

I'm running a similar but smaller project (5k MAU), my oldest map is central London in 1561

https://onamap.me/maps/London1561/

I got into it because I was interested in the technical challenge of registering GPS to maps which are very warped compared to reality, like very old maps or illustrated tourist maps.

My home page is here for more: https://onamap.me/

I also came across this similar project a while ago:

https://www.verbeeld.be/2024/11/17/using-gps-in-the-year-156...

Good luck continuing to build out the project!

Reply View 1 reply
  • Soupy 2 days ago

    whoa this is wickedly cool! and yes, georeferencing these old maps is the bane of my existence right now

    awesome project

    Reply View 0 replies
xrendan 3 days ago

I would absolutely love if you brought Canadian maps to this.

I work for Build Canada and I would love to see some maps from the fur trade and early exploration to tell stories.

If you want to chat my email is brendan at buildcanada.com

Reply View 2 replies
  • Soupy 2 days ago

    Hey Brendan! I also would love to add Canadian maps, it's been a huge request from my users and something I've been wanting to focus on all year. A big challenge I have in bringing the service to new regions is just data access, both to raw hi-res map imagery as well as to satellite, LiDAR, etc so this is on my todo list to begin digging into what the Canadian government offers. Brave new world for me

    Will absolutely reach out to connect!

    Reply View 0 replies
dijital 3 days ago

Nice project! The National Library of Scotland has a nifty tool focused mainly on the UK and Ireland that does something similar (with a paid print service attached): https://maps.nls.uk/geo/find/marker/

Reply View 1 reply
  • fiftyacorn 2 days ago

    I love this tool - seeing what was originally on areas. Granted its mostly fields

    Reply View 0 replies
jtwaleson 3 days ago

Really cool! I built the website for an antique maps dealer (Dat Narrenschip) when I was 15 or so and fell in love with antique maps. It's still up and running but now on Shopify.

Over the years I experimented a bit with leaflet.js and thought of overlaying maps too so you can navigate maps through time, but quickly realized it was super difficult. Kudos for setting this up!

If you want to expand to other regions, or chat, or get access to high-res scans, let me know. I think plenty of old maps sellers would love to sell their maps this way.

Reply View 0 replies
maddimini 3 days ago

That's pretty cool, I'll definitely check it out. I've also been looking around for old maps like this.

I also started a small free-time project, where users can download maps as wallpapers for free and put them on their walls :]

https://www.map2image.com

Reply View 0 replies
ethanseal 3 days ago

GIS is underrated. This is awesome!

Have you looked into speaking with the various SHPOs in each US State/Territory?

I've worked with several of them a fair bit and they have a ton of old maps hidden internally. Especially for small, specific areas of the state, like historical districts.

Reply View 0 replies
t_mahmood 3 days ago

That's nice! I have some GIS data of my country it was pretty detailed, it may be outdated now, but covered a good amount of administrative details. If you are extending and need some data on Bangladesh, I can send you

Reply View 0 replies
danielvaughn 3 days ago

I've always wanted a map with a horizontal slider for the year, so I can watch the map change as you slide further back in time.

I know that's different than what you're building, but what you're doing is super cool. Nice work!

Reply View 0 replies
cosmicgadget 3 days ago

That is awesome. Of course you can bolt LLMs on to any product, I'm thinking AI reviews of (historical) local businesses to give it that google maps feel.

Reply View 0 replies
crubier 3 days ago

Awesome work. Just out of curiosity, where do you source the maps from? In france IGN has a ton of old maps

Reply View 1 reply
  • Soupy 2 days ago

    Around 90% of the maps currently on the site are from the US government (USGS). The last 10% are from public institutions and libraries and this is the newest segment that I'm actively working on growing. My hope is to flip this ratio with time.

    I also have a few partnerships in the work with some private collections but those have proven trickier to actually get to a "yes". It also involves a lot of bespoke work to process and ingest each individual source so I'm not focusing as hard on this type of sourcing anymore.

    Reply View 0 replies
JV00 3 days ago

I would love to use this if it supported Italy

Reply View 0 replies