Which year: guess which year each photo was taken

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

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

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.

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.

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 love it. Just too bad you can't zoom in the picture on mobile. Had to open the picture on a new tab.

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

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 interesting concept, if there was more variety it could be some like timeguessr.

WhichYear 4/20/25 4939 pts (top 1%) 1⃣ avg. years off

2⃣ 1⃣ 1⃣ 1⃣ 1⃣

whichyr.com