A guessing game built from the photographic record

Every photograph is a small time capsule. The cars parked on the street, the cut of a coat, the shape of a streetlight, the script on a shop sign — all of it quietly encodes a year and a place. When Where turns that into a game. You're handed an image with no caption and asked to estimate the year it was captured, drop a pin where it was shot, name the country, or do several at once.

Scoring rewards accuracy rather than speed. A guess one year off still earns full marks for the date; a pin a few kilometres from the truth still scores well. The goal isn't to trick you — it's to reward careful looking.

When a round starts, the game fetches a fresh photograph live from a public archive, picks the details it needs (the true year, the true coordinates, the license), and hands you the image. You inspect it — zooming in for detail costs a little of your maximum score, so every zoom is a small wager. You lock in a guess, and the reveal shows the truth beside your answer on a timeline, a map, or both.

There is no account and no database. Your streak and best score live only in your own browser. Nothing about how you play is uploaded anywhere.

Images are drawn from open archives — chiefly Wikimedia Commons and The Metropolitan Museum of Art — filtered to public-domain and Creative-Commons-licensed files. The author and license of each photo are shown on its reveal screen. Read more on the image sources page.

When Where is free. It's kept running by unobtrusive ads placed between rounds, and it collects no personal information beyond what any website receives. If you're new, learn how to play or jump straight into a round.