About Kosmopo.li
Kosmopo.li is a shared album for towns and villages. People who live somewhere, or who came from there, put up the old photographs they have and write down what they remember about them.
Why it exists
Most old photographs of a village sit in one family drawer, in a shoebox of postcards nobody has looked at for thirty years. They are not lost, exactly, but nobody can see them.
The harder loss is the knowing. A picture of a street is a picture of a street until someone says who kept the shop on the corner, which year the trees came down, whose wedding that was. When the people who recognise the faces are gone, the photograph stops meaning very much. This site is a place to put those pictures while there is still someone able to name them.
How a village page works
Anyone can create a page for a real town or village. We use official place data, so a page is tied to a real place rather than a name someone invented.
The people who look after a page review each photograph before it appears, which keeps the archive accurate and keeps out things that do not belong. Anyone signed in can add a photograph, place it on the map, or correct a detail on someone else’s.
What we ask of you
Only upload photographs you have the right to share. Write down what you actually know: an approximate year is more useful than a confident wrong one, and there is a box for saying a date is approximate.
Be careful with people who are still alive. A name on a photograph is a piece of information about a real person.
Who runs it
Kosmopo.li is a small independent project, not a company. There is no advertising, no analytics and no third-party tracking. Place data comes from GeoNames and the maps from OpenStreetMap, both of which are made by volunteers too.
If you have a question, or you want a page for your own village and are not sure where to start, write to us.
Get in touch
Start with your own village
Search for it first. If it already has a page you will be taken there rather than starting a second one.