Guess the Age of Photos: An Interactive Web Platform for Historical Image Age Estimation

TL;DR

This paper presents an interactive web platform that gamifies historical image age estimation, engaging users in educational activities and providing data for computer vision research.

Contribution

It introduces a novel gamified web platform for historical photo age estimation, combining user engagement with data collection for AI model training.

Findings

Users perform better in relative comparisons than absolute guesses.

Older decades are easier to identify.

Platform achieves high user satisfaction (4.25/5).

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.