Our history is all of us

Historypin is a community-driven platform where people share photos, sound, or video to tell stories of places that matter to them.

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What new stories will you discover?

Explore collection themes. Themes are big poetic ideas that can encompass many different things. See more collection themes below.

Discover collections
Creativity
Resistance
Movements
World around us
Rituals
Humans
Family
Innovation

What you can create with Historypin

Pin local history on a map using photographs, sound, or video. Tell your own stories or collaborate with others to build collections that add to the understanding of your community's people, places, and historical events.

Tell your community's story

Share your community's history to honor the past and inspire new generations. Map notable historical and cultural sites to tell little-known or lost stories of people, places, and events that matter to you.

Connect around community memory

Design and create programs online and in person to bring people together and strengthen community bonds. Come together through collaborative projects on Historypin to share stories about your community!

Educate and inspire

Use Historypin as a teaching tool. Build digital humanities projects for classroom use and inspire students to be curious, explore, and document! Chart new territory by illuminating under-explored research topics.

Explore people's stories

Be curious! Learn about the history made in your own community and in communities around the world. See what other people have shared about topics you care about. Discover valuable information for research projects or just for fun!

Support the stories that shape us

Shift Collective is the non-profit organization behind Historypin. Historypin was created in 2009 to inspire people to take photographs out of storage boxes and help bring cultural memory to life. It was developed for communities around the globe to “pin” their stories to the world map, creating conversations and online collections that illuminate all our histories. 

Donate to Historypin

Featured collections

There are thousands of community stories to discover on Historypin. We've curated a small collection of some of our favorites. What will you create? Get started with a free account.

Historypin testimonials

Historypin is a great, user-friendly tool that has allowed our community-based archive to create a visual representation of local history.
Maigen Sullivan, PhD, Co-Executive Director, Invisible Histories
Historypin helped us mobilize social capital as a source for development… This project is crucial to understand the diversity of this country.
Consuelo Gaitán, (former) Director of the National Library of Colombia
It has been great to have the energy the staff at Historypin brought to our work. The ideas that a third party brings to the table opens avenues of thoughts and discoveries that wouldn't have been thought about otherwise.
Natalie Milbrodt, (former) Founding Director, Queens Memory Project
It's important to us that we allow those who experienced the history to shape the narratives around its preservation.
Brandon Lunsford, University Archivist
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How can Historypin help you tell your story?

We offer free tools, advanced plans, and personalized support to help you collect and share stories.

Explore paid plans

Explore community-based archives

Create collaborative collections that share your community's history, to remember and move forward.

Explore community archives

Explore libraries and institutions

Start a cultural history project to build community or to showcase your organization's holdings.

Explore libraries and institutes

Explore educators and students

Find out how you can use Historypin as a teaching tool for class assignments and projects.

Explore educators and students

Support the stories that shape us by donating today.

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