Chronophoto

About Chronophoto

Chronophoto began as a browser game and spread mostly by word of mouth; photography sites such as PetaPixel and Amateur Photographer wrote about it in 2023. It has since been rebuilt as an official iPhone app. The idea is simple: you are shown a photograph and asked one question, what year is this?

A round is all about reading details. Cars, clothes, hairstyles, shop signs, the grain and colour of the film, the shape of a phone or a television: all of it points to a decade, and the closer you narrow it down the more you score. You can enlarge the picture to look at small details before you commit. Answers within a year or two are worth close to the full 1,000 points, and the score drops quickly the further off you are; miss by more than about twenty years and the photo earns nothing.

On the website there are three ways to play. The Daily gives you five photos, the same for everyone, once a day, and keeps your streak and best scores. Unlimited lets you play five-photo games whenever you like, and Party gives you a code so friends can play the same photos and compare. The iPhone app adds Survival, where you keep going until a health bar runs out, and a Flash mode where the picture disappears after a few seconds.

Chronophoto suits people who like history, old photos or spotting the small giveaways in a picture. It sits well beside geography games like GeoGuessr: instead of asking where a picture was taken, it asks when.

How to play Chronophoto

1. Open the Daily on chronophoto.app to see the first of today's five photos.
2. Study the picture, enlarging it if you want to check small details.
3. Drag the slider to the year you think the photo was taken and submit.
4. See the real year and your points, from 0 to 1,000, then move on to the next photo.
5. After five rounds, check your total out of 5,000 and your streak.

Screenshots

Tips

• Start with what dates fastest: colour or black and white, film grain, and the cars in the street.
• Clothes and hairstyles narrow a decade; technology like phones, screens and cameras often narrows it to a few years.
• Being roughly right matters more than being exact; anything more than twenty years off scores nothing.
• Look for printed text, posters and shop signs when you zoom in; they can give away a brand or an event.
• Remember that black and white photos were still taken well after colour film arrived, so do not lean on that alone.

Questions