Rephotography in the Digital Era: Mass Rephotography and re.photos, the Web Portal for Rephotography

TL;DR

This paper reviews digital rephotography techniques, introduces the re.photos web portal for collaborative and automated rephotography, and discusses future needs for mass digital rephotography including automation, storage, and social features.

Contribution

It presents the re.photos web portal with innovative features for collaborative, automated, and large-scale rephotography, addressing future digital mass rephotography challenges.

Findings

Rephotos supports collaborative rephotography and image registration.

Automated batch processing and smartphone app integration are feasible.

Long-term storage and social media features are essential for mass rephotography.

Abstract

Since the beginning of rephotography in the middle of the 19th century, techniques in registration, conservation, presentation, and sharing of rephotographs have come a long way. Here, we will present existing digital approaches to rephotography and discuss future approaches and requirements for digital mass rephotography. We present re.photos, an existing web portal for rephotography, featuring methods for collaborative rephotography, interactive image registration, as well as retrieval, organization, and sharing of rephotographs. For mass rephotography additional requirements must be met. Batches of template images and rephotographs must be handled simultaneously, image registration must be automated, and intuitive smartphone apps for rephotography must be available. Long--term storage with persistent identifiers, automatic or mass georeferencing, as well as gamification and social media integration are further requirements we will discuss in this paper.