How to preserve a place that’s disappeared

This post is about the tools and techniques you would use to “digitally preserve a physical place”. To gather the digital imagery connected to a geographical area and to download it for yourself.

This is also a “behind the scenes” look at how I made my post “A place I’ve never been to. A place I’ll never go.” I started research for that post on March 26, 2024 and hit “publish” on April 12, 2024.

Below is a song to set the mood: Anemoia – “nostalgia for a time you’ve never known.

Let’s get started.

Finding images in an area

Here is how I went about finding images from inside and around Market Village mall, the location in the post.

Google Maps

Another plentiful source of pictures was Street View itself. You can easily take a flat 2D screenshot of a certain view. There are also several ways to download full Street View panoramas (listed in a later section).

Note that you can “go back in time” with Street View to previous years’ photos. To rewind time, click the subtle “See more dates” link on the upper left:

You can also find regular photos taken at businesses by clicking on a business’ red marker, hovering over the picture on the upper left, and clicking on the “# photos” button that comes up.

Another way of finding Google Maps photos in a certain area is to go to that location, bring up the “Explore” bar at the bottom right, and to move around the map – looking for new images to come up:

The above method is very unreliable. A better way of finding all these images in an area is to use Google Earth Pro. This desktop application will show you those same hidden images in a clearer way. Make sure to enable the “photos” layer on the lower left in the interface.

You’ll see icons like these wherever a photo is available:

Flickr

Next there is Flickr, the image-hosting and photography discussion site. Images from your location will be divided into 2 groups on Flicker.

The first group are images that have your location’s name in their description/title/metadata. To find them, do a regular text search for the name of the place you’re exploring. Relevant photos will come up.

The second group of photos on Flicker are ones that were taken at your location but don’t have the location’s name written out anywhere. The only way we can find them is through a latitude & longitude geographical tag on the image.

For these, visit the site loc.alize.us to look up images inside a geographical area. Browse to your location on the map. Then, as shown in the screenshot below, make sure to set the settings “Enable Explore Mode” and Sort by “Relevance“. Wait, and move around the map slightly. Blue markers will begin falling onto the area you’re viewing – each marker represents a photo taken at that spot.

Watch out for images that are falsely tagged with a certain location (this is also an issue with Google Maps). You’ll need to be vigilant and a little familiar with the actual place you’re researching, to discard photos mistakenly placed in the area you’re exploring.

Other image sources

Yelp and Foursquare were other sources that I used to find images. Note that the Foursquare page shows “84 pictures available” at the mall but none are clickable (a sign of a site that’s collapsing). If you go to the Wayback machine, you can download some of the pics from their old archive snapshot.

Because my post was about a mall, all those commercial photos were legitimately “the thing I was looking for”. If you are looking to document a rural/natural area then those 2 sites won’t be much help. But then, niche sites like iNaturalist open up as potential sources.

I don’t know much about Instagram, but you should explore it – it is a rich repository of images. And there is at least one way to find all images taken around a certain location. A quick search reveals additional methods.

There are other sources of imagery. Whether they will work for you depends on the kind of location we’re talking about. Imgur, Google Images, Bing Images, Pinterest and Yandex image search are some to check out. OldTO.org and Pastvu.com are also good sites.

Videos

For my post, I totally forgot to look into videos of the mall! A search on Youtube returns this high-definition walking tour of Market Village from 2017. There are also slide shows from some of the same photographers who’s photos were on Flicker. Sometimes getting an extra picture is as simple as taking a screenshot of a high-def video.

Another good source of historical footage are news’ organizations video archives. Often, content is available for you to preview and can be purchased at a reasonable price. Examples:

• Reuters Archive Licensing
• Associated Press Newsroom photos and videos
• BBC Archives (easy lookup for pictures, but you’ll have to go to England in person to view videos)
• National Film Board of Canada (also a decent band!)
• Net-Film.ru (Russian archive of videos. VK is also excellent for videos.)

Downloading the images

Flickr downloading

Some photos will be simple to download (a “download” button will be present when you view them).

Others will throw up a barrier because the photographer blocked them from saving. For those, right click the image and choose “inspect” in your browser. The image URL will appear in the “Inspector” window at the spot marked:

Right click on that image URL, copy it and paste into a new browser tab. Then “save as” to download the image.

Google Maps – downloading regular pictures and photospheres

Downloading user-posted pictures and photospheres from Google Maps is straightforward. I created a bookmarklet that does the work for you.

If you want to do this manually, here are the steps:

0. Pick a photo you like, right click on the page and click “Inspect”. Reload the page – this records all the web traffic during page load.
1. Go to the “Network” tab in the inspector.
2. Click the “Images” filter to see only the image files on page.
3. Sort descending by Size. The biggest file is probably the image you want to download.
4. Copy the URL to a new tab, go to it and “Save as” local file.

Google Maps – downloading Street View panoramas

Street View panoramas – ie. when you “go on the road” and see a picture of everything around, above and below you – are hard to download. They’re usually made up of 128 images that are downloaded gradually as you look around and then tiled next to each other.

Again, I created two bookmarklets that will turn the panoramas into a .jpeg file for you.

If you want a more heavyweight tool, check out Street View Download 360. The free version can download 1 panorama at a time. The paid version can download all spheres / street views in a geographical area you specify. This tool was made by the talented Thomas Orlita who’s in his very early twenties!

For reference, the post about saving Street View images by MwOsint got me started on the path to saving images from Google Maps. Capturing Spherical Scenes from Google Street View was a post that gave me confidence in creating a bookmarklet to stitch the smaller Street View tiles into one.

Downloading Youtube videos

There are many free websites that will let you save a Youtube vide. Search for “Youtube downloader” to bring one up. I successfully used the SaveFrom.net downloader. If you’re downloading videos in bulk, or need maximum control over the process, what you need to find is an open-source tool called “youtube-dl“.

Viewing and sharing your images

Photospheres

To embed a photosphere in your own website, like I did here, you should try out the Photo Sphere Viewer JavaScript library.

If you do not run your own website, you can view your locally-saved spheres on RenderStuff’s Panorama VR Viewer or the Arachnoid.com 3D Photosphere viewer.

Image Maps

To create a map with clickable “hot spots” that bring up images, like I did in my post, you need to set up an “image map”.

First, create a flat graphic of a map with icons overlaid on top. To create a mobile-friendly image map use the ImageMapper Tool and mark each of your icons as a clickable area.

To create a traditional – but mobile-incompatible – image map using the HTML <map> element you can pass the same image you created through the Tool at Imagemap.org to mark areas as clickable.

With both ImageMapper and Imagemap.org, you would take the HTML code they output and put it up on your site.

Parting words

I like the idea of a dead mall that only exists in Cyberspace.

Because I took the time to download and re-host the relevant images, an ordinary mall like Market Village stands a good chance of outliving Google, Yelp, Foursquare and Flickr.

It is tempting to think that Google will exit forever. But I remember such pillars of the internet as Geocities, AltaVista, Myspace and del.icio.us – all gone now.

Content on the web is “there forever” until it isn’t.
You have the power to preserve the things you like. Just because 😉

---

Back in current day at site of Market Village: if you look close enough on Street View you’ll see a Monarch butterfly. Unmoored in time.