If you’re sitting on a collection of old photographs, postcards, or local history material and wondering what to actually do with it beyond a folder on a hard drive or a dusty box in a cupboard, I want to make the case for GhostViewer — a rephotography platform I built where old photos get paired with a modern view of the same spot, so people can see exactly how a place has changed.
Here are three things worth saying about why it’s worth partnering with.
1. Your images get seen by people actively looking for them — not scrolled past
Old photos on a general archive site or a Facebook group get a burst of attention and then vanish into a feed. On GhostViewer, every image lives on a location page, tagged against a subject taxonomy and organised by county, so it surfaces to people who are specifically searching for the history of that place. Pairing an old photo with a present-day match (and a Street View link at the right heading) gives visitors a reason to linger rather than glance and scroll on.
That matters for exposure. I already have image and content partnerships in place — Geograph, Flickr contributors, the Estelle Helsen/W.S. Thomson archive, and postcard sellers including Judges — and I’m actively growing partnerships in Hampshire and Berkshire first, then Cambridgeshire and Oxfordshire. If your material covers those areas, or anywhere else in England, there’s a home for it that’s built around making it findable, not burying it.
2. Contributing is genuinely low-friction
I know from twenty-five years of building websites that the biggest killer of “we should share our archive online” projects is the admin: file exports, uploads, metadata, logins. So GhostViewer is built to remove that friction wherever possible:
- Magic-link authentication — no password to set up or remember, contributors just click a link.
- A Lightroom Classic plugin (“GhostViewer Contribute”) that exports straight from a Lightroom catalogue into the site as a pending contribution — no manual export-then-upload step.
- A location and subject taxonomy already built (18 subject tags, county-based location structure), so contributed images get organised properly rather than dumped into an unsorted pile.
- Support for digitised cine film as well as stills, if your group has home-movie or Super 8 material from a location.
For a photography group, archive, or local history society run largely by volunteers, that’s the difference between “someone will get round to it eventually” and material actually going live.
3. It’s a two-way relationship, not just a place to dump files
Partnering isn’t just about handing images over. Contributors and partner organisations get credited and linked, which sends traffic and recognition back the other way — useful if your group depends on visibility to attract members, donations, or commissions. GhostViewer also sits inside a small network of related sites I run (including a classic car directory and a historic British TV index), so there’s cross-promotion beyond GhostViewer itself where it’s relevant.
I’m also actively thinking through additional incentives for partner organisations beyond links and traffic — so if you’ve got views on what would make a partnership genuinely worthwhile for your group specifically, that’s a conversation I’m keen to have, not a settled policy I’m asking you to accept as-is.
Who this suits – Partner Page
- Photographers with a back-catalogue of location shots that could use a second life and an audience.
- Archivists and museums wanting a low-effort way to get part of a collection in front of a public that’s actively browsing local history, without building their own platform.
- Local history and heritage groups who want their research and images to have a permanent, organised, findable home rather than living only in a Facebook group’s post history.
If that sounds like a fit, head over to GhostViewer now.
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