Our non-profit team at Historypin has been supporting community history efforts around the world for over 5 years. In that time, over 2,500 cultural heritage organizations and 65,000 individuals have joined our community to share stories, memories, snapshots, audio recordings, and in short: their history. It’s been an honor to work closely with many of you to better understand our collective potential for leveraging history for social change and for building stronger local communities with intergenerational and intercultural understanding.

To that end, we’re excited to relaunch Historypin today with a number of major changes to support these efforts and provide tools to help foster collaborative community projects. 

You’ll notice that the Historypin website has a new look, with exciting new design and functionality updates. We’ve also revamped it to work better on mobile devices. Keep reading to find out more about the new features, or watch our 2 minute video. 

New Features

Open Collections

We have completely re-designed collections so that people other than you can add to them. You can create one and start it off by uploading your own pins, or “repinning” pins already on Historypin. Then you can invite anyone else to add to it. If you need help managing it, you can also add other people as Collection Managers.

You can explore these shared collection in a map and gallery view, search them, share them and embed them.

A collaborative collection

 

The pinning experience

We’ve got a shiny, streamlined new pinner which works much the same but allows you to choose an approximate location for your pin, so if you don’t know exactly where it is, you can choose a town, region, country etc. In addition to photos, videos and sounds you can now also add “text pins” with memories or local stories. 

 

A new Community Forum

Historypin has an enormous network of people around the world who are sharing history collections, gathering memories and engaging their local communities with heritage activities. The forum is a space for people to connect with one another, share what they are doing, pass on tips, find inspiration and ask others to help out with their local history quests.

 

You can also use the Forum to start and organize conversations around your Historypin collection; each collection has its own thread under the general “Historypin Collections” topic header and conversations will appear on your collection.

Updates

Based on feedback from the Historypin community, we’ve revamped Profiles, Collections and Tours which have a new look and some new functionality.

Your Profile

• All your information, pins, tours and collections are still there.
• We’ve simplified the design and focused on making it easier to search, organise and edit your stuff.
• Profile customization has been streamlined to better fit into the look and feel of the overall the website, and can link to your website, blog and social media channels.   

Your Pins

• All your pins are on your Profile. You can see them both in a map and in a list, and you can edit them just like before.
• Excitingly, you will now have the ability to do a full text-search on all of your content, along with new ways to sort and visualize it.
• All pins now need to be pinned to a map so you won’t see “unpinned pins” anymore. If you need access to them, get in touch with us.
• All pins now need to be belong to a collection. To get you started, we’ve created one for you and all your pins are in it. You can rename it, or move pins into other collections.

Your Collections 

• Any collections that you had before are there 
• Your existing collections are now “open” and other people can now contribute new pins to them. So if you want to gather history about your neighborhood for instance, you can invite your neighbors to add content as well as add people to help manage the collection with you. You can always remove any contributed content.
• We’ve added collections to the map, but we’ve had to do some guesswork around their locations. So if they are in the wrong spot, just click “Edit Collection” and you can re-locate them.
• Check out the “About” section – you can now see who has contributed to it and talked about it.
  

   

Your Tours

• Any tours that you have created are still there but look a little different. Don’t worry, you can still explore and edit them.
• As of yet, you can’t add them to a collection, but we’re working on it.

Over the coming weeks we will be posting in more detail about the new features and how to get the most out of them, so keep an eye on this blog. And of course we want to hear your feedback so please do get in touch if you have questions or comments – login to Historypin and hit the question mark on the bottom right to send us a message.