By now you’ve probably noticed several of the new changes that we have released across Historypin. We’ve been working with our community to develop improvements to Historypin that make it easier to share your stories and build community around your local history.

In this post we’re highlighting the new version of our “pinner,” our aim being to make it easier to upload to Historypin. Included in it are new features that many of our members have said would be useful, including:

– Text pins: you can now add pins which are just made up of text (eg. a memory, a snippet from a novel, etc.)

– Photos from the web: you can upload photos directly from the web, via a URL.  So now you can point to your existing photos already on the web without having to reupload.

– “Imprecise pins:” if you don’t know the exact location of your pin, you can add a rough location, eg. a neighbourhood or a city, and narrow down the location as you hear from your community and solve the mysteries of old photos.

– Collections: in our new version of Historypin collections, all pins will belong to a collection. So whenever you add a pin, you need to add it to an existing collection or create a new one.

It’s a work in progress, and we will continue to take the contributions of our members around the world to help improve this and other features of our site together. Our mission has always been to bring communities together through the sharing of history, and the aim of the above changes (among others), is to ultimately bring the focus of our site back to this original aim, and to make it easier to run community projects. We welcome your feedback as you add your own content to Historypin, and hope you’ll comment here or help with a bug report if you have any problems.

Kerri

Historypin Community Officer

Edit 26/1/2016: In the past month we have also updated the License section of our pinner, to make it easier to choose how your pin can be used by others.