By: Eric SmalleyWalk down certain city streets and you can practically feel the ghosts around you. Who was walking here 100 years earlier? Which buildings survived from earlier centuries? Wasn't there a famous fire around here? An iPhone app aims to help you spot the ghosts, or at least inform your imagination. WhatWasThere lets anyone upload and view old photographs that are tied to a location via Google Maps.
The free app, and accompanying Web site for the deskbound, is a crowdsourcing platform for assembling a visual historic record of the world's streetscapes. People can upload photos and tag them with location and year.
Places with associated photos are marked on a Google Map. Click on a mark and a list of available photos pops up with thumbnail, label, year, and distance from your location. Click a list item and the photo comes up. Put the photo in full-screen mode, aim your phone's camera in the direction of the scene in the photo, and you can drag a slider bar between camera view and photo to get a now-and-then perspective.