One interesting observation is how much less variation there has been in clothes for the past 20 years or so. Someone from 2005 could look completely undisguisable from someone today, by just wearing regular non-fashion forward 2005 clothes. Same goes for haircuts.
Same can't really said about someone from 1955 and 1975, 1980 - 2000, etc.
edit: Score 4695 Avg. Years Off 3.0
The "global score distribution" (and my score) and the end was pretty good idea. Much more informative than just some high score list.
That was fun and definitely a bit challenging to figure out—I scored 3677, landing in the top 46%, with an average of 9.2 years.
As for some (hopefully constructive) feedback: I think the year selection slider could benefit from a few adjustments. If an image is from the distant past—say, pre-1950s—it might make more sense to use decade-based precision rather than individual years. For example, a black-and-white photo had me way off that caused me to lose 20 years of my life :). It would be helpful if such images were categorized more broadly, something like “191x”.
For mid-century images (roughly 1960–1990), a 5-year interval could strike a better balance. I came across one from that era and was six years off. And for more recent images, say post-2010, a one-year precision feels reasonable.
Of course, this suggestion mainly applies if we're deducing the year based on visual cues like clothing, hairstyles, and the environment. If the game is intended more as a quiz based on the text descriptions under the images, then it shifts more into trivia territory—and that’s a different type of challenge altogether.
Great idea! The trick is to zoom into peoples clothing, and then the associated event becomes quite obvious. Eg. Photo of Disco, no crazy lapels, obviously towards the end of disco, which puts you within a year or two.
Might have gotten lucky but zooming in on clothing got me to 1.8 years off on average (top 2%).
Tried plugging it into the new o3 model out of curiosity and it got 0.2, i.e. it got everything exactly right save for one that it missed by a year.
4580. Helps if you recognise the current affairs. Gay marriage, Arab spring, London Blitz came up. Leaving me with a party with a mix of drab and 70s disco clothing so I guessed 1981 and was close enough!
The one that got me was some people at a beach in black and white.
A fun (hard) addition to that would be the color photography by Sergey Prokusin-Gorsky because the picture quality is so out of its time (~1900) https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sergey_Prokudin-Gorsky#Galle...
I love it. Just too bad you can't zoom in the picture on mobile. Had to open the picture on a new tab.
One thing I realized was: the presence or absence of smartphones is an easy way to determine whether something happened before circa 2009 or after. Another: indoor smoking.
WhichYear 4/20/25 4311 pts 5⃣ avg. years off
6⃣ 1⃣ 5⃣ 2⃣
Wordle opens (or used to) a mock modal dialog with a copy button for sharing the results. I feel like opening the modal rather than requiring clicking the 'share' button probably leads to a lot more shares?
I think I'd save a longer and just put "WhichYr.com" as the top line, bump the date and score to the next line.
I've got 4861 (top 2% ~3 years off)
If someone likes additional challenge then Teuteuf Games' WhenTaken has both guessing the year and location: https://teuteuf.fr/
They also got Worldle which was covered on hn - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=30367906
Thanks, got very lucky in the sense that they were recognizable events mostly, except the ladies on the beach, so was 1.2 years off.
You know, this game pretty much demonstrates how fast cell phone addiction happened. You can tell the year by how many people are staring at their phones, and how big their phones are. You don't see nearly as many people reading newspapers in old photos as there are people gormlessly staring into their phones in contemporary photos.
This was fun! Sent it through to my "gamedle" group chat and it's probably going into my daily rotation.
One thing though, the url in the share text doesn't start with https:// so it doesn't turn into a clickable link when posted in some chat clients.
I have a tendency to date films and photos by their quality. Thats why I was 16 years off on the 1934 one. I got the first one exactly right, even though Im born in 1990.Some B&W cameras 80 years ago took better pictures than most cameras today.
I wanted to play more but couldn't find any way. Refresh page, no new game link, tried entering URL again. Checked but no cookies to delete. That's one way to ensure I never visit the site again.
4878, avg 2.4 years off. Way better than I thought I'd do, I think I just got lucky. I agree that it's a lot like chronophoto.app, but that also has freeplay. This has a nicer looking UI but I think a worse feature set. In particular the scroll-to-zoom and freeplay on chronophoto are nice to have.
Edit: I had seen the photo in the subway before, or something very similar. It's an interesting decision to use photos from big events that people might recognize. (Not inherently bad IMO, just not what I would have intuitively chosen)
This is exactly the same game as chronophoto.app, as far as I can tell, except with way better UX and as a “daily challenge” type game. Well done, anyway! It’s a fun game.
Here's another one for guessing ethnicities https://hbd.gg/play/
Neat thing! I'm gonna add it to my round of daily games.
I'd suggest changing "Share results" to some variation of "Copy results". Share looks like it's gonna open some sharing menu and deter people from playing (and hence promoting your game)
WhichYear 4/20/25 4142 pts (top 22%) 7⃣ avg. years off
4⃣ 6⃣ 1⃣ 2⃣
When I press "All Times Stats", I see "Games Played: 2". But I only played today. Off-by-one error?
I love this idea so much and would make this one of my daily games.
FWIW: The jankiness of the slider feels quite jarring, given it’s the sole interactive element. It makes the thing difficult to stick with. On my iPhone 12, it lags way behind and the numbers update at like 10fps.
I really hope this keeps getting daily images added.
Very fun, but I'm horrible at this
WhichYear 4/20/25 3045 pts 13 avg. years off
4⃣
Nice game! Good UI experience. When sharing you get 4 different scores (points, top %, avg error, total error) I think. This is a little confusing, better to share one score (maybe plus total error, maybe) so people can more easily compete. 4 scores is too confusing.
This is interesting concept, if there was more variety it could be some like timeguessr.
Looks like I also have to play "guess the timezone of the creator of this game".
I enjoyed playing it yesterday. It's now 11am today and it's still not open again. I have no idea when it will be.
I love this!
Small bit of feedback that – after expanding an image – it'd be nice to more easily collapse it and return to the game screen. Maybe by pressing escape on the keyboard and/or clicking on the image.
Definitely the most polished game of this sort that I’ve seen. Nice work!
3121 pts, 14 avg. years off.
Decent try considering most of the options were USA specific.
What do the last emoji numbers mean when you share your results?
Below my points, and how many avg years off, I got a dartboard, then "6", "3", emoji of a blind man walking, then "6".
Fun, though I'm apparently terrible at this -- avg 14 yr off.
UI note: the statistics tab shows games played: 2 when I only played once, and the lifetime points appears to be double my one game.
5.2 years average off. The first was a dance club in the 70s, I guessed 78, but it was 79... There was one where nudists where taking off their clothes, I guessed 50s but it was 1934!!!
4920 here. Waiting for contenders ;)
More seriously I often wonder how this works in the brain when there is no obvious historical clue. Is it akin to guessing a numerical quantity (like when seeing a crowd) ?
Fun game.
Suggestions:
Make the logo clickable so it goes to the homepage
On the sharing stats page, add a link to start the game, e.g. if I send the link to someone to challenge my score, there needs to be an easy way to start the game.
If you grab statistics per photo rather than the whole thing, and maybe do rough client geolocation, you can turn this into a sociological study and publish a paper about it…
Guessing the year each photo was taken can be surprisingly accurate when you observe changes in technology, fashion, or even product developments visible in the background.
I came back and played this game again. Thought you would like to know!
That was fun. I got a score of 4174, and an average of 6.2 years off. Clothes and hair styles were quite helpful in 3 of the pictures.
I'll definitely take a look at it tomorrow.
I guess I'm getting a bit paranoid, but whenever I see a game like this, my first suspicion is that it's just a trainset annotation UI in disguise.
I don't understand this site's "come back tomorrow" part. Wouldn't it be better to let people play as long as they want?!
I created a similar game a few years ago for guessing the year of an object in the Met’s collection. Would love any feedback if people want to try it.
I tried playing again, but how?! I am presented with the last play stats, but see no way to play again.
I can share, or get all time stats. That's all.
This is a great way to gather labeled training data for a neural network that can guess in which year a photo was taken.
ChatGPT 4o guessed perfectly 8 in a row!
Nice idea. I was 6 years off on average. Probably something the new AI models might be very good at.
7.2 years off on average. First 3 were 3, 1, and 1 year off respectively. Last two blew my momentum.
Score: 4246 pts 6 avg. years off
I am not american or native english speaker or never have been outside Asia
Very clever idea! This was fun!
I did OK, didn't try to hard but was surprised at how good people are at this!
I love this stuff. I was always good at guessing song, movie or photo years.
This is really fun. My score was 4307 (top 12%) with average 5.8 years off.
This is fun! Thanks for the post.
I got a score of 3740 and an average of 10 years off.
4902, 2% off. I like how you've created a guess distribution
Man I am in love. The global leaderboard is inspired!
Styles haven’t changed that much since jeans and a tshirt
ripoff of https://www.chronophoto.app ?
it's really fun/simple so can't feel too bad
I feel dumb, I can't figure out how to play again
I created a similar game a couple years ago for guessing the year of an object in the Met’s collection. Would love any feedback if people want to try it. https://davidfdriscoll.github.io/met-chronoguesser/
WhichYear 4/20/25 4939 pts (top 1%) 1⃣ avg. years off
2⃣ 1⃣ 1⃣ 1⃣ 1⃣
whichyr.com
Tried this, it is very addictive game, good job team !
WhichYear 4/20/25 4215 pts (top 17%) 6⃣ avg. years off
3⃣ 1⃣ 8⃣
whichyr.com
o3 got a SCORE AVG.4989 YEARS OFF 0.2 TOP 0%
Peaked bell-curve: normal
No ad while using DuckDuckGo/iOS.
Very clean.
Does it have only one set of photos per day?
would be so fun if it has a multiplayer mode
tried this game, it is very addictive, good job team !
Now is there anything which will take this, run it through ML and then find a date for all of my scanned family photos?
This was fun!
This was fun
Score
3433
Avg. Years Off
12.2
geoguessr clones/copies are so hot rn.
Cool idea, m8. I ended up just looking at clothing and fashion choices. Although black and white photos do tend to represent historical era (ie, holocaust, ww2)
There's a similar game, but for guessing both the year and the location
https://timeguessr.com/
Discussed on HN a couple of years ago too: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=37203511
edit: found another game like OP in the linked thread https://www.chronophoto.app/game.html