[HN Gopher] Chronophoto - Guess the dates of photos
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       Chronophoto - Guess the dates of photos
        
       Author : MrsPeaches
       Score  : 36 points
       Date   : 2023-01-28 09:09 UTC (13 hours ago)
        
 (HTM) web link (www.chronophoto.app)
 (TXT) w3m dump (www.chronophoto.app)
        
       | stefncb wrote:
       | This is really fun. The year picker is surprisingly good on
       | mobile.
        
       | ClapperHeid wrote:
       | Quite a good idea. And good fun. Some suggestions for
       | improvement:
       | 
       | 1: The photos are very US centric. So difficult for the rest of
       | us to have any context to work from [eg: Jeopardy quiz show, long
       | distance US city street scenes, basketball matches, cheerleaders,
       | etc]
       | 
       | 2: Similar to above. Some of the photos are of things like long
       | range city street scenes or beach scenes where there's nothing
       | much to go on as regards recognising the 'accoutrements' of a
       | particular era. The photos which work best are ones where there
       | are decent views of people's clothing, vehicles, machinery, etc.
       | You need to give us something specific to the era in question, to
       | go on!
       | 
       | 3: I think the 'High Score' functionality is broken. It's still
       | showing my first go as my high score. Even though I've bettered
       | that every time since. It might also be good to eventually have a
       | leaderboard, so we could place ourselves amongst other high
       | scorers. [EDIT: High score has started working now. Must have
       | been a glitch].
       | 
       | BTW - for anyone else playing, you can use 2-finger trackpad
       | scrolling to zoom in and out on the photos [a la Google Maps]. I
       | only discovered this by accident and it made things a lot better
       | as, in some of the photos, the people and 'devices' are very
       | tiny.
        
         | arp242 wrote:
         | I got quite a few non-US ones: a number used Cyrillic writing,
         | some Spanish or maybe Portuguese, Japanese, Dutch, French,
         | German, some other languages I didn't immediately recognize,
         | and a number were clearly not from the US based on other clues
         | from the people or environment.
         | 
         | I don't think this game needs to be "fair"; the most fun were
         | the ones where I was wildly off!
        
           | ClapperHeid wrote:
           | >a number used Cyrillic writing, some Spanish or maybe
           | Portuguese, Japanese, Dutch, French, German, some other
           | languages I didn't immediately recognize..
           | 
           | It's not the languages used in signs that I had a problem
           | with. And I wasn't complaining about the fact that there were
           | a lot of US ones _per se_. It was more that, several of the
           | US ones you only had the  "cultural reference" [for want of a
           | better phrase] to go on, as there was nothing era-defining in
           | the image.
           | 
           | For example, I got a photo of some basketball players. No
           | period costume, no recognition factor of anyone involved, or
           | the team colours or kit. As far as I knew it could have been
           | from any time in the past 60 years. Similarly a picture of
           | some cheerleaders --same problem. I also got a picture of a
           | department store I'd never heard of. Just the building. No
           | people or vehicles or anything. Presumably it would have
           | meant something to someone from the US, who might have
           | recognised it or had an idea of when the brand was
           | established. But it meant nothing to me.
           | 
           | Conversely, I got several photos [as you did] with signage in
           | foreign languages. But, in those cases, there was enough
           | other "stuff" I could pick up on --things like the syle of
           | clothing or the facial hair, or the cars-- to allow me to
           | make a reasonable guess.
           | 
           | So, I'm not objecting to images being predominately fomr the
           | US. I presume it's an American site. But, as I said
           | previously, we need something to go on, otherwise it's just a
           | random guessing game.
        
             | kmoser wrote:
             | I tend to use clues like color saturation, grain, and depth
             | of field as much as cultural references. Assuming they
             | didn't add artificial artifacts, that can give you a pretty
             | reasonable range to start with.
        
       | arp242 wrote:
       | High Score: 3689
        
       | ancientworldnow wrote:
       | Fantastic game and extremely usable UI even on mobile. My biggest
       | groupchat (which admittedly has a lot of photographers) has been
       | playing all morning. 4196 is the score to beat!
        
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       (page generated 2023-01-28 23:02 UTC)