Our team was motivated to start PastVu out of the desire to preserve the historical context on a single map and timeline. We also wanted to bring together images of the same place that had never been seen together in another situation. And we wanted to combine widely known photos and personal testimonies of a bygone era. We are based in Russia but photos on PastVu offerlobal coverage. 

We prize community contributions with a local history knowledge. We are run entirely by volunteers and rely on the crowdsourced tagging of more than 134.000 registered users.

Together, these many volunteers have uploaded more than 1.7 million photos. We also operate a regional moderation system, with currently 90+ moderators. The open source purpose-designed platform allows anyone to suggest a feature, report bug, contribute code, i.e. get involved in development.