Guess the Age of Photos: An Interactive Web Platform for Historical Image Age Estimation
Hasan Yucedag, Adam Jatowt
TL;DR
The paper presents Guess the Age of Photos, a gamified web platform that invites users to estimate the dates of historical photographs in two modes: Guess the Year and Timeline Challenge. Built with Python, Flask, Bootstrap, and PostgreSQL, it leverages a 10,150-image DEW subset spanning 1930–1999 to study human temporal perception and to generate annotated data for computer vision. Results show that relative judgments in Timeline Challenge yield substantially higher accuracy than absolute year guesses, highlighting distinct patterns in how people perceive temporal cues across decades. Beyond entertainment, the platform serves educational purposes and provides a data source for CV research, with potential for dataset expansion and educational partnerships.
Abstract
This paper introduces Guess the Age of Photos, a web platform engaging users in estimating the years of historical photographs through two gamified modes: Guess the Year (predicting a single image's year) and Timeline Challenge (comparing two images to identify the older). Built with Python, Flask, Bootstrap, and PostgreSQL, it uses a 10,150-image subset of the Date Estimation in the Wild dataset (1930-1999). Features like dynamic scoring and leaderboards boost engagement. Evaluated with 113 users and 15,473 gameplays, the platform earned a 4.25/5 satisfaction rating. Users excelled in relative comparisons (65.9% accuracy) over absolute year guesses (25.6% accuracy), with older decades easier to identify. The platform serves as an educational tool, fostering historical awareness and analytical skills via interactive exploration of visual heritage. Furthermore, the platform provides a valuable resource for studying human perception of temporal cues in images and could be used to generate annotated data for training and evaluating computer vision models.