Street view but people upload their own photos all over the world both past and present

I've been obsessed with this idea and I have no idea where to start. I love Google street view. I think it's so cool you can go almost anywhere in most countries and see close to current day photos and in some cases as far back as 2007.

As a photographer I often take lots of photos with no place to upload them for others to see. I just edit them and put them on a hard drive. Social media is growing more and more video oriented. Gone are the days of taking photos of things and posting them for friends to see. People still do, especially photographers but we've absolutely moved away from the early days of Facebook and Instagram where anyone could just take a photo and not try and be performative. It was an honest, more down to earth experience in my opinion.

The reason I'm going more for this idea and not just another Instagram clone would be because these retro style social media startups that claim and try so hard to be what Instagram or Facebook once were- always flop. Whether that's because people aren't interested or advertising money runs dry? I can't say since it's not my realm. Especially if there's no one using the app. Why download it and post if your friends aren't using it..

That's why for my idea I would do something no one's done before. Think of it like street view. You zoom into the globe, moving to a street, or a place and you see spots you can click. Well instead of limited 360 coverage from a moving car, it's anyone with an account posting their photos and tagging the area by pinning it to a map!

The biggest downside would probably be mislabeling where the photo was actually taken, or uploading a photo from the past and getting the dates wrong. Trust me no one has a perfect memory and not every camera has the date set right.

I feel like if it were an app that forced users to only use their phone camera in the app and forced them to use location services this would probably push a lot of people away. I think people who like taking photos don't want to force themselves to use some app. They just whip their phone out and use their camera app or their actual physical camera.

This idea may be great for photo archival. Especially for historical reasons. I've tried finding websites like this to no avail. Wouldn't it be cool seeing everyone's photos from an event? Or a photo spot that always has someone taking a photo. You could go back in time and see what something looked like. Surely people have remembered an area but couldn't say for certain whether "that thing" was built yet. Now you could confirm that!

Maybe there could be a confidence rating. Say you uploaded a photo but you weren't entirely sure where EXACTLY it was taken, or what month/year. You could make it sortable by filters where the owner of the photo can tag what they know so if you absolutely needed the exact month of something- someone's winter photo won't be in your summer photos list.

From my experience- Google's "business review" pop up that show photos from a landmark or business are extremely unused. As a photographer I never really see enough photos of "photo spots" that make me want to go check out the area solely based on Googling it. I have to do extra research or just wing it. Using this app you could zoom into an area, or simply find inspiration by looking around your town! (I guess you could also just make an app called "Photo Spots" or something where everyone posted photos of contained areas/spots so people could confidently visit.)

I hope some of this was possible to visualize. I think lots of clear organization and explanation for the purpose of the app would be necessary as well as moderation. But I'd love a place where I could dump all my photos so others could see, especially on a map. Maybe even with profiles so you could see all the places and mass amounts of photos people have taken. Shot in the dark, maybe someone reading this knows of something vaguely similar.

Flickr comes to mind as I'm finishing this up. But that's MUCH more photographer oriented. I'm thinking much more map based so people can easily look around an area.