Category: Toronto

Back in 2018, Google’s “Sidewalk Labs” was trying to romance Toronto into creating a dystopian surveillance neighbourhood because progress.

As part of their charm offensive, they created “oldto.sidewalklabs.com”. It was a kind of Google Streetview with back-in-time photos of different locations in Toronto. The photos were sourced from the City of Toronto’s Archives and the Toronto Public Library.

After the pandemic, the site disappeared – but the team that built it had open-sourced it. I’ve wanted to revive the site for about 5 years.

And it’s finally revived!

> Check it out at raccoonix.jacobfilipp.com <

It turns out that the site was already revived at oldto.org, by the fantastic Back Lane Studios team. They put on various events that have to do with documenting Toronto’s history.

As of today (March 2, 2026) my site includes Toronto Public Library images that oldto.org does not – but I will be sharing them with the BLS team.

Future work:

Next, I will attempt to find updated links to each photo on the City of Toronto Archives – all their item links are broken.

I would like to also fill in the picture gaps for the fascinating Leaside neighbourhood – home to an aerodrome and other aviation enterprises.

There is also a booklet of clippings related to the Aerodrome at the Toronto Public Library that I could examine: https://tpl.bibliocommons.com/v2/record/S234C1555791

This is where you can find metadata for the 187,407 records stored in the Digital Archive of Ontario. 3,174 of those records have digital images hosted on my site, and available for download.

I’ve been working on a project that required this data. The Digital Archive serves it up in chunks, and I decided to make it available publicly as 1 file. This data was downloaded on February 11, 2026. Get the data here:

The 3,174 images are ones that specifically depict locations in Toronto (for the Raccoonix map). They are available here:

https://raccoonix.jacobfilipp.com/TPLimages

These are the “/preview” quality images from the Archives site. Their file names are numbered according to the primaryMedia.value in the .json file.

Each record in the JSON array is structured like this:

{
  "sourceId": {
    "label": "Source ID",
    "value": "351994"
  },
  "primaryMaker": {
    "label": "Primary Maker",
    "value": "Salmon, James V. (James Victor)"
  },
  "primaryMedia": {
    "value": "src: https://digitalarchiveontario.ca/internal/media/dispatcher/2141122/full"
  },
  "displayDate": {
    "label": "Date",
    "value": "1957"
  },
  "invno": {
    "label": "Object number",
    "value": "PICTURES-R-352"
  },
  "id": {
    "label": "Id",
    "value": "7867983"
  },
  "title": {
    "label": "Title",
    "value": "T.T.C., McCaul Loop, McCaul St., east side, north of Renfrew Place"
  }
}

Some notes:

Element	Description
Sourceid.value	can be used to compose the URL of the object’s record on the official site. So “351994” can become https://digitalarchiveontario.ca/objects/351994/
invno.value	this is the same field as the “object number” on the item’s official webpage
primaryMedia.value	If you change the endings of the URL to /full, /thumbnail and /preview then you will get 3 different image sizes
displayDate.value	Values don’t have a set format. You will see blanks, and values like: 1850 7/18/1985 1827-1838 approximately 1918 n.d. March, 1985 27 June 1990 October 27, 1986 unknown

Microsoft Excel can open JSON files and turn them into tables. If you’d like to do that, go to Data > Get Data > From File > From JSON

Then choose your file, and turn “To Table” in Power Query

Your “List” column will get a little “left + right arrow” icon on it, click it and click OK to “expand” the underlying fields in each row

A bunch of new columns will appear. Go through the same process, expanding each column:

When done, click “Close & Load”. You will get the whole dataset as a familiar Excel sheet: