Google Turns Street View Into a Time Machine, Adding Back Its History of Imagery

Having taken pictures of more than 6 million miles’ worth of road, Google is more than doubling the amount of global Street View imagery by adding all of its archive photography.

The company’s Google Maps Web application will now include a time machine feature where users can move a slider to see all historical images of a place. As much as possible, pictures of the same place have been aligned so they have the same perspective as one another.

That doesn’t mean you’ll be able to move the slider back and forth to see historical images of Rome compared to the present day ruins -- Street View imagery only goes back eight years, at most. But it does mean you’ll be able to play with some recent history, like the building of the Freedom Tower in Lower Manhattan, the building of the 2014 World Cup stadium in Fortaleza, Brazil, and the destruction left by the 2011 earthquake and tsunami in Onagawa, Japan.