[HN Gopher] AI helps add 10k more photos to OldNYC
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AI helps add 10k more photos to OldNYC
Author : evakhoury
Score : 106 points
Date : 2026-04-06 18:24 UTC (1 days ago)
(HTM) web link (www.danvk.org)
(TXT) w3m dump (www.danvk.org)
| dorolow wrote:
| Very cool! I am surprised at the use of 4o, but I guess it was
| pretty good at OCR for its time
| crazygringo wrote:
| It really says something about the current state of affairs that
| after reading the headline, my first thought was _oh god no, the
| photos are probably all hallucinated..._
|
| But it's actually really cool how they used AI to _better
| determine the locations_ of the photos. I love this!
| NoSalt wrote:
| Same ... sort of. I thought it was going to extol the virtues
| of Vibe Coding. I am quite happy to be "disappointed".
| TrackerFF wrote:
| As long as they're not GenAI altered photos, I'm cool with these
| things.
|
| I'm a pretty avid member of various history groups, and one thing
| that has absolutely driven me nuts for the past couple of years
| is how many people there are that use AI for upscaling and
| colorization of photos - not knowing or noticing how the models
| fundamentally alter the photos. A couple of zooms in on the
| photo, and it is nightmare fuel.
|
| A week ago me and some members spent a couple of hours trying to
| find a building from the early 1900s, because someone had
| uploaded a photo and asked about the building. Sifted through old
| maps, newspapers, etc. but couldn't find anything. Turns out said
| photo had been upscaled via AI, which in turn had added some
| buildings here and there.
|
| But, yeah, for stuff like OP posted it _could_ work out nicely.
| mikeyouse wrote:
| Likewise. There's this older woman who is trying to add some
| historical color to our local beach town FB group by using some
| terrible AI tool to colorize pictures from the early 1900s. She
| doesn't accept any feedback that it's problematic to share what
| are essentially fake pics in that way.. they often just
| randomly remove people, or add new ones. Buildings are changed,
| cars are remodeled, it's crazy how different the before/after
| are. The comments are usually split as well, but I absolutely
| loathe how AI is used there. She means well, but the tools are
| so bad for this and so poorly explained.
|
| One random example of a before/after:
| https://imgur.com/a/WIAYLHm
| Morromist wrote:
| I was looking for photos of NYC in the 1990s a few weeks ago.
| I eventually found some, but my search was greatly obstructed
| by AI photos of NYC in the 1990s.
|
| The experiance made me certain that AI is going to to much
| more harm than good to the buisness of archiving historical
| photos.
|
| As for the lady who is distorting photos to colorize them - I
| don't even understand why you would want to do that. There
| are other ways!
| ok123456 wrote:
| Maybe she just thinks it's cool? It's hardly the worst use
| of AI on Facebook.
| Morromist wrote:
| yeah, you're right. That's why she's doing it. But its a
| weird idea: I like this historical photo, so I'm going to
| distort in order to add color, which makes it not a
| historical photo anymore. I guess to her the distortion
| is so minimal it loses nothing, but to me it loses
| everything.
|
| Its like saying "I love Da Vinci's art so I'm going to
| draw a moustache on everyone in the last supper" which
| you probably wouldn't do if you really loved Da Vinci's
| art.
| rexpop wrote:
| > If you really loved Da Vinci's art.
|
| Meh, so what if I only love Da Vinci's art to the degree
| that it's amusing to adulterate with mustaches?
| Morromist wrote:
| Huh. I didn't consider that.
| tux1968 wrote:
| There are some pretty obvious distortions when you
| closely look at the difference between the historical and
| AI-corrupted images. But I have to admit, the colorized
| one has a nice vibe to it, if you don't look too closely
| it gives a really nice feel for what the moment was
| actually like, more than the accurate black-and-white.
|
| Which is to say, I think it comes down to what you value
| most out of historical photos; a forensic record of
| truth, or general idea of what it was like to live at the
| time, compared to today.
| torben-friis wrote:
| I'm firmly against uncontrolled AI use. But as long as
| the edits are strongly labeled, I have to say I enjoy the
| effect.
|
| Maybe it's because I'm too young and I've never had B&W
| content around, but the edited picture allows me to feel
| the photograph as real, as a place I could have walked
| around, which I can't really do with the original. I find
| that effect more valuable than a specific roof being
| deformed or whatever.
| flir wrote:
| You could always one-up her by animating them.... maybe add
| Godzilla in the distance occasionally.
|
| (Provenance is _so_ important. The infinitely-recopied local
| history photos were never a great source anyway).
| tux1968 wrote:
| In the same way, so many current cameras (mostly phones) that
| do automatic post-processing of images, up to and including
| AI, is going to lessen their future archeological value.
| z3c0 wrote:
| I'm reminded of Samsung's "AI moon" debacle and how divided
| people were over it. At the end of the day, any photos with
| so many unknown variables wouldn't suffice for scientific
| purposes.
| tux1968 wrote:
| It would be nice if every upsampled image (done with AI or
| otherwise) contained a copy of the source image in its
| metadata.
| arctic-true wrote:
| Do you have any recommendations for colorization tools? I agree
| that all of the popular image models subtly tweak faces, it is
| very uncanny when working with pictures of people I knew before
| they passed. In a pre-GPT age, there were some good but not
| great colorization tools, and as far as I can tell you can't
| get better-than-2020 performance unless you're willing to get
| your expression adjusted or your eyebrows redone.
| brrrrrm wrote:
| I checked 3 spots I'm familiar with and 1 is wrong
|
| https://www.oldnyc.org/#707133f-a this is supposed to be here
| https://www.oldnyc.org/#702487f-a
|
| also, if folks are interested in these old depictions of NYC,
| check out https://1940s.nyc/ as well!
| gdulli wrote:
| An elephant in the room is that if you have too much data to
| process without AI, you have too many results to check for
| correctness when they come out of the AI.
|
| This has been true since before LLMs, but now so many more
| people and use cases are enabled so much more easily. People
| are undisciplined and quick to take short term gains and
| handwave the correctness.
| crote wrote:
| It is less of a problem if the output is _explicitly_ marked
| as AI-generated and unverified, so people can treat it as a
| rough first draft. But mix AI output with well-vetted human-
| reviewed data, and you 've basically made your entire data
| set worthless.
| danvk wrote:
| (Author here) IIUC you're saying that 707133f-a should be at
| 5th Ave & 9th Street, not 5th Ave & Union Street? Can you say
| more about why? The text on the back of the first image says
| "Union St. Station, 5th Ave," which is how it winds up at
| there. On the other hand, the NYPL page[1] titles the image
| "Union St. - 18th St."
|
| (I briefly got excited that there might be a street sign _in_
| the photo, but if you zoom way in it says "DENTIST")
|
| +1 to 1940s.nyc. Very different photos -- those are were taken
| for tax assessment, the ones on OldNYC were taken to document
| the city as it changed. The photographer had an arrangement
| where he'd get tips from demolition crews, and go shoot
| buildings before they were gone forever.
|
| [1]:
| https://digitalcollections.nypl.org/items/5a5e06a0-c539-012f...
| lapetitejort wrote:
| Some other historical street view websites:
|
| https://yesterdays.maprva.org/#11.5/37.5438/-77.4392 (specific
| to Richmond, Virginia, however deployments for other areas are
| in work)
|
| https://pastvu.com/
| BlueRock-Jake wrote:
| This is pretty sweet. Funny seeing all the dots circling around
| New York and then abruptly stopping at Jersey City.
| thadt wrote:
| AI had been a super useful for processing historical data.
| Interviewed a volunteer last month from the diary archive in
| Germany, and they're using supervised AI for diary transcription.
| Going from (old) personalized hand script to text is a _lot_ of
| work, even for experienced transcribers. Being able to automate
| the first pass of that has been a huge boon to their processing
| pipeline.
| superxpro12 wrote:
| Can you go a bit deeper on this?
|
| If the risk of mistranslation is high, I fail to comprehend how
| letting AI "take a swing at it" does not reduce the translation
| quality?
|
| How are they ensure no drop in translation quality?
| thadt wrote:
| They're doing transcription, not translation - so, turning
| someones pages of scrawled script into typewritten text. They
| have around 20 people nationwide that are able to do this.
| Most of them are older volunteers who aren't all that
| interested in computer assistance, but about a third of them
| have started leveraging the newer AI tools and it has
| accelerated their throughput significantly.
|
| Having a 'best guess' at the lettering is really handy - in
| some cases the writing is really rather difficult to make out
| at all. Even being able to run something as simple as
| frequency analysis on stroke patterns would be a massive
| benefit.
|
| At this point they're becoming throughput bound on the
| scanning process. Diaries are digitized since the archive is
| in one place and their transcription experts are spread out
| over the country.
| jmyeet wrote:
| I hadn't considered or read about this problem before but it
| makes sense.
|
| It reminds me of the cuneiform problem. Between 500,000 and 1
| million tablets have been collected. This is one of the
| earliest preserved writing systems. Even so, fewer than 10% of
| these tablets have been translated. I was surprised to learn
| this but it makes sense. There are several problems:
|
| 1. Scribes used a lot of shorthand;
|
| 2. Cuneiform itself changed over time;
|
| 3. Writers would use multiple languages (eg Sumerian,
| Akkadian), even on the same tablet. There are relatively few
| people fluent in these languages, particularly in multiple of
| them at once;
|
| 4. To some extent the tablets are 3D such that a 2D photo might
| not be sufficient to translate because you might need to
| physically turn the tablet to accurately see the marks; and
|
| 5. In some cases the tablets are incomplete or broken so you
| may not to figure out how things fit together.
|
| I wonder if AI can help make inroads into this 90%. I really
| wonder what is waiting to be unearthed.
| pc86 wrote:
| Lots of 4,000 year old complaints about copper, I would
| imagine.
| ComputerGuru wrote:
| I have mixed feelings about this. It's absolutely phenomenal that
| such a treasure trove was unlocked thanks to AI, but presenting
| the AI results are "definitive" (even with an "edit" or "report"
| feature that's applied equally to human-located and AI-located
| results) isn't really a win. The old dataset might have been
| incomplete, but where locations _were_ determined, they were a
| result of a (probably neural /autistic/ocd) human contributor
| that had some measure of true confidence in the results. AI
| contributions are great, but imho they should _never_ be allowed
| to freely mix with and dilute human contributions: the resulting
| dataset is permanently polluted.
|
| Ideally they'd always carry an "AI-generated" flag (in the db and
| in the frontend) until manually reviewed (or never) by a human.
| If anything, this is actually in AI proponent's favor as it would
| let you periodically regenerate or cross-validate (a subset of)
| the AI contributions some years down the line when newer and
| better models are released!
| danvk wrote:
| (author here) Just to be clear, none of the photos were ever
| human-located. The system this replaced was, roughly, regular
| expression + Google Maps geocoding API. The only photos located
| by hand were the ~200 I used for my test set:
| https://github.com/danvk/oldnyc/blob/master/data/geocode/out...
| ComputerGuru wrote:
| Thanks for the clarification!
| mskogly wrote:
| Super cool project, nice work.
| CrzyLngPwd wrote:
| If the images are "edited by AI" then they are not. They are
| prompted by the source image, but a new image is generated.
|
| I haven't seen an "AI edited" image that hasn't changed important
| details, and so the result is just yet more slop.
| leviathant wrote:
| Please respond to what's linked, rather than make assumptions
| based on the headline.
| AIorNot wrote:
| Its funny that author posted a very cool use of AI to help
| filter/organize and OCR hard to read text about a large photoset
| and built a great way to visualize his ongoing project with a lot
| of innovation and cool output..
|
| But the majority of the commnents (including the top comment) on
| this thread are about how bad AI Images are and how bad AI is in
| general, how it is altering history etc -when the author didn't
| even do any of that in his post
|
| It shows the mindset of the community these days more so than the
| technology.
| joshuamcginnis wrote:
| As someone with a massive collection of antique postmarked
| postcards (probably the largest in the world for a particular
| city), this is very helpful and encouraging for getting my
| collection online.
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