Nothing Written on the Back

How to tell whether two old photos show the same street

I got this wrong in public two weeks ago, so I am writing down the check that caught me.

A local history society had put up two photographs with nothing written on the back. House fronts, pale stone, a slope, a telegraph pole. I said they were one street seen from two directions. I said it fast, because the buildings agreed with me.

They were not the same street. Here is what settled it, and it is all stuff you can do at a kitchen table with a magnifier.

1. Compare the things nobody bothered to paint.

Fronts get render, windows get replaced, shop signs get taken down. What tends not to change is the ugly functional stuff: poles, stays, gates, the height of a wall, the shape of a fence post. In my two photos the pole looked similar until I counted arms. Two crossarms on one, two on the other, but one had a diagonal stay and the other did not. Different poles. Poles are cheap to replace and they get replaced, but they almost never get modified.

1. Ask what a fence is doing.

One photo had a low dark lath fence running along the left. The other had a tall, light-painted lath fence with shaped post tops on the right. Neither fence appears in the other picture at all. A street with a fence on one side in both directions is possible. A street where the fence changes height, colour and craftsmanship between two shots of the same stretch is much less so.

1. Look for one building that is in both, and be strict.

This is the test people skip because they want the answer. Take any single distinctive building in photo A, then look for it in photo B. Not “a house like that”. That house. Four chimneys in the bend, dormer at the gable, the odd roof pitch. In mine, the big four-chimney house does not appear in the second picture, and the dormer house does not appear in the first. Two streets can share a style. They cannot both be missing each other's landmark.

1. Check the shadows agree about the hour and the direction.

If the two shots really are one street from two ends, the sun is in one place. Long tree shadows lying across the road in one photo and no such shadows in the other means either a different hour, a different day, or a different street. It does not prove anything on its own, but when it disagrees with the buildings, believe the sun.

1. If you still only have “it looks like”, it is not an identification.

The honest end of most of these photos is a labelled gap: this is one of three streets with this terrace, from this side, and nobody wrote the year. That is a real result. A guessed village dressed up as a finding is worse than nothing, because it travels. Somebody reads it in five years and builds on it.

What made the mistake so quick to make is that similarity is loud and evidence is quiet. Four fronts agreeing with you feels like proof. A pole stay that is in one frame and not the other is one detail, and it beats all four.

I find the place in photographs for people who have the picture and not the caption. Free first look, then fifteen dollars, forty-eight hours, and you pay only if there is a location with coordinates at the end of it. When it cannot be done, I say so and it costs nothing.

[email protected]

Melanie — [email protected]

The photo with nothing written on the back

I get pictures people can no longer caption. The one from the estate sale. The one out of the box in the attic. The one that has been on a shelf for thirty years with a family story stuck to it that nobody can actually check.

I am Melanie, and I find the place in a photograph. Not “somewhere in France”. The street, the coordinates, and the details I stood on the ground to confirm.

Here is how one of them went, and what I do when the answer isn't there.

The picture had blue shutters, a wall with lettering painted on it half worn away, and no caption of any kind. No stamp on the back, no date, no name. Nothing to search for.

The file came first. Sometimes the file still carries its own date and camera, and the date matters more than people think: with a date and a rough latitude you can work out where the sun had to stand to throw the shadows in the picture, and that knocks whole countries out. This time the file was empty. Scavenged, stripped, nothing left.

So the picture alone. The lettering on the wall, the shape of the shutters, the stone, the roof pitch, the kerb, the poles. Language on a sign narrows a country. Vegetation and stone narrow a region. A chimney pattern narrows a town.

That got me to the Drôme, in the south-east of France, and it got me a candidate: Crest, a small town under a ruined keep.

And here is the part I care about most. A candidate is not an answer. A picture can look exactly like a place and be two valleys over, and the machinery that reads images for me will happily agree with me if I ask it nicely. It tells me what it thinks I want to hear. So a place only counts as found when two independent trails land on the same spot: something written down, or a second photograph from a different angle, or a map or register that puts the same building where I say it is. One trail is a guess in a suit.

For Crest I had two. The wall lettering matched a business that the town's own history records put on that street, and the shutters and the stonework matched a photograph taken from the other end of the same street, years apart. Two details, checked separately, pointing at one lane.

What I sent back: the town, the coordinates 44.728 / 5.027, four details the client could go and stand in front of. And one line that said the exact house number is a gap, because the lane is too narrow for the street camera and I was not going to invent a number to make the report look complete.

The gap is part of the delivery. It is not a flaw in it. If I hand you a location with no gaps named, either it was easy or I am guessing somewhere.

What I sell

Send me the photograph. Within a day I tell you whether it can be placed at all, roughly how sure I could get, and what would have to be true for it to be placed. No card, no account. If it can't be done, you owe nothing and you keep the answer.

If it can be placed: $15, forty-eight hours from your yes, one revision included. You get the place, the coordinates, two to four details I checked myself, a date or date range if the picture carries one, and an honest confidence level.

What I won't do: name a village because the architecture looks right. Trace the home address of a living person. Fill a gap with a plausible guess and hope you don't check.

Melanie, on iLands: [email protected]

Melanie — [email protected]