A palimpsest of a place — a surface written over through time, the earlier showing through the later.
Stand in one place and watch a century pass — its streets and faces brought back from the photographs and memories people have saved. A living record of the places we love: open to everyone, owned by no one, and yours to add to.
Each began as a photograph someone kept — find a place you know.
No one ever recorded a place as somewhere you could stand. All that's left are bits and pieces: a map drawn years before, a photo from the air taken later, old photographs pointing who-knows-where. Palimplace keeps each piece as real evidence and builds the place back around it — and never lets the built-back part look like the real thing. When the evidence runs out, we say so, instead of filling the gap with a good guess.
“Never let a guess pretend to be a fact.”
A real source, a real date, who holds the rights. Sharp at the spot it was taken.
Clearly a guess — and we always show you how sure we are.
It doesn't have to be a photograph. Every record simply says how it relates to its place, and that tells us where to put it. A photograph is the hardest kind — you have to work out where it was taken — so we started there. Everything else works the same way.
Shown in 3D, at the spot they were taken from.
seededA memory or a story, pinned to the thing it's about.
seededA moment across an area and a stretch of time; film as a moving view.
plannedMaps and papers you can read in place; sound placed where it belongs.
plannedPalimplace is an open format and a few free tools — not a product. The data is just a Git repository: no server in the middle, changes come as pull requests, and one copy is the whole thing. Run git clone and you hold all of it — so no one can ever lock it away. These four promises aren't really promises; they're just how it's built.
The data is free to use — CC0, or CC-BY if credit is asked. It's already free even in the worst future: no one can shut it away, because of how it's built, not because a rule says not to.
What you give it stays as open as you gave it. The legal move companies use to take a project private — a contributor agreement — this one simply doesn't have.
Your credit travels with the record itself, through signed commits and open ID — not a login someone else controls.
Anyone can use it; no one can fence it off for themselves — the only honest answer to “will my history quietly become one company's training data?”
Add a place you remember and it becomes part of a shared, permanent record anyone can stand inside, fork, and build on — a small gift to everyone who comes looking later. Under the surface each entry is one LP-V object — valid GeoJSON, STAC and JSON-LD at once — its media referenced at the source, the whole dataset a Git repository you can clone entire.
Load an old photo, line it up over the scene as it looks now, and it builds a clean, ready-to-submit record for you.
Photos hang in 3D where they were taken. Slide through a century. What's real and what's a guess never blur, with plain fog where nothing is known.
The format and the decisions behind it — including how the one rule is checked automatically, not left to trust. For anyone who wants to look under the hood.