TimeGuessr

TimeGuessr was made by Gus Owen, who started it as a side project in his gap year before studying maths at the University of Leeds. He grew up near Newcastle following Instagram accounts that post old local photos, and that gave him the idea of a game about placing photos in both space and time. The game took off after the YouTuber GeoWizard played it on his channel, and it now runs as a company with apps for iPhone and Android.

Each game has five photos. Some are famous news pictures, others are street scenes, family snapshots or landscapes. For each one you place a pin where you think it was taken and set a year on a timeline. Points are split between the two guesses, so a photo you can place exactly but date only roughly still scores well, and the other way round.

The daily game gives everyone the same five photos each day, and you can share your score without spoiling the answers. Outside the daily you can play random games whenever you like, try games made by the community, and in the apps build your own rounds from your photos to send to friends.

TimeGuessr suits players who enjoy GeoGuessr but want history in the mix, or history fans who like a map. Because each photo is a single still image, it is less about exploring and more about reading every detail you can see.

After each guess the game names the photo's source and tells the story behind it, then splits your points into up to 5,000 for the year and up to 5,000 for the place. On 27 October 2026 the first photo was a street in Belgrade from that same year, so the daily mixes recent news pictures with older ones. A calendar on the archive page opens any earlier daily.

The site and apps can be switched into 14 languages, among them German, Spanish, French, Japanese and Turkish. The web version shows banner ads under the board. A TimeGuessr Pro subscription removes them on the web and in the apps.