About

Welcome to OldTO, an interactive map featuring a wealth of digitized, historical photos from the City of Toronto Archives.

OldTO was originally the work of Sidewalk Labs, a Google “urban innovation unit.” The project was headed by senior software engineer Dan Vanderkam, and modeled on two sites he had created earlier: OldNYC and OldSF. (You probably won’t be surprised to hear that OldNYC maps historical photos of New York City, and OldSF of San Francisco!)

Sidewalk Labs was planning a 12-acre urban development in Toronto’s Portlands at the time. Some time after it dropped the project in 2020 and left Toronto, it stopped hosting the OldTO site.

At Back Lane Studios, we were sad to see OldTO disappear. We loved being able to look through old photos of Toronto neighbourhoods! Fortunately for us, Sidewalk Labs had (quite generously) made the source code for the site freely available.

Now Toronto software developer and Back Lane Studios’ friend Michael Lenaghan has resurrected the site. We’re thrilled to be able to share this OldTO reboot!

For more information, here is Dan’s blog post that introduced OldTO when it was first launched, and here is Dan’s website.

The Photo Map

How does OldTO work? Click on a dot and you’ll see photos for that location — photos dating as far back as 1865. The photos were digitized by the Toronto Archives and then “geocoded” — i.e., placed on the map — by OldTO.

The geocoding is based on the Toronto Archive’s descriptions of the photos. If you see a mistake, it’s either due to an error in the description or an error in OldTO’s interpretation of the description. Email us at info@oldto.org with the details and we’ll see if we can fix the mistake.

By the way, if you’re interested in a particular period of time, you can use the sliders in the top left corner to narrow the range of years. And if you’re interested in a particular street or neighbourhood, you can search for it right above the slider. Just be aware that you may need to add “Toronto” to your search! Otherwise you could end up anywhere in the world.

(Both search and the slider will be hidden if there isn’t enough space — if, for example, you’re on a phone or small tablet.)

Back Lane Studios

Back Lane Studios is a neighbourhood not-for-profit in Toronto’s Roncesvalles district. We offer a variety of programs, including photography for kids, writing and video workshops for adults, and lectures and art exhibits. We recently launched a project to map seniors’ recollections of their lives and neighbourhoods, capturing their stories in photos, videos, and in written form. Hence our interest in OldTO!

We’re calling our new initiative Mapping our Memories.