ATTention: old home lover crowdsource opportunity
Showcasing ocean city’s Older Homes
Some of you may know that last year Friends of OCNJ History and Culture launched an interactive map website of OC homes and businesses. One of the key features is the ability to view photos along with other information about a property. Many of the initial photos were obtained from Steve Warnalis’ collection (thanks again Steve). To encourage others to enhance the website, we created the ability for any user to upload photos for inclusion on the map. That effort met with initial success, but has since slowed down.
Recently, we updated the map to include the Historic District (HD) boundaries. Even more recently, we added the ability to select only those properties that are in the HD. This made it painfully obvious how many of the HD properties were missing photos.
Since my wife and I walk through the HD area almost daily, we thought it would be a great opportunity for us to add photos for all HD properties. I made a list of all HD properties missing photos, and we have been systematically working our way through the HD, taking photos and uploading them to the map website. We whittled it down from nearly 200 properties, to just 43 as of this morning. We hope to complete this effort very soon.
How You Can Help
This got me to thinking about all the other 100+ year old homes on the island. Believe it or not, there are still more than 1400 of them throughout the island. But we only have photos for 447. This is where the idea to use crowdsourcing comes in. I’m sure many of you walk around your neighborhoods and beyond. If everyone could take the time to photograph old homes in their area and upload them to the map website, we could dramatically increase our inventory of old home photos.
How do you know what homes to photograph? Well, to help with that, we added another new feature to our map website: a link that downloads an Excel file containing the addresses of all the 100+ year old homes missing a photo (982!). The file is sorted by street and house number for ease of finding addresses in your area. So, all you need to do is go to the map website (https://friends-ocnj-maps-794650887556.us-east4.run.app/) and click of the link labeled “Old Homes Needing a Photo” in the upper left of the webpage. Once you have taken the photos, you can then upload them by clicking on the link labeled “Upload a Home’s Photo” or by going directly to the Photo Upload website (https://photo-upload-app-794650887556.us-central1.run.app/). Another feature is that the Excel file is updated as new photos are added to the website. So, you can always redownload the file periodically to always have the most current list of homes.
We are really looking forward to what the Old Home Lover community can accomplish!!