What is Chronophoto?
Chronophoto presents one archive photograph per round and asks you to date it. A slider spanning 1900 to 2025 sits beneath the image. You position the slider at your chosen year and submit. Five rounds complete one game. A guess of 1930 against a true date of 1918 awards 242 points out of a possible 1000 per round.
How to play Chronophoto
- Open the daily game. The date appears at top left and the counter reads Round 1 of 5.
- Examine the photograph for grain, clothing, vehicles, signage, and any caption printed on the image.
- Drag the slider to your estimated year between 1900 and 2025, then press Submit.
- Review the true year and your score, then proceed to the next round. Five rounds produce the day's total.
Why play Chronophoto?
It tests a skill no other game does: reading a photograph for its decade. Film grain, clothing, vehicle shapes, the way a crowd stands all offer clues without labels. The scoring penalizes imprecision, since a twelve-year error costs three quarters of the round. Narrowing from "somewhere between the wars" to a specific half-decade is the entire challenge. It plays like GeoGuessr with the map replaced by a timeline.
Reading the feedback
The reveal is immediate and numeric. Your submitted year remains on screen. The true year appears in plain text, for example "PHOTO WAS TAKEN IN 1918". The slider redraws to show both positions so the size of the error is visible rather than merely stated. Points appear under the year and accumulate across all five rounds.
Modes
Daily
Five dated rounds shared by all players that day, with a statistics panel tracking your history.
Unlimited
Endless rounds outside the daily challenge, accessible from the top navigation.
Party
A multiplayer mode for playing the same photographs against other people.
Tips and strategy
Date the technology, not the subject. A horse-drawn scene can be 1950 in a rural setting, but film stock and print quality rarely mislead by more than a decade.
Read the caption before analyzing the image when one exists. A hand-lettered title on the print dates it far more precisely than the scene does.
The penalty curve is steep. A twelve-year miss retains only 242 of 1000 points, so committing to a half-decade beats hedging in the middle of the slider.
Popular questions
How many rounds are there?
Five per game. The counter at the top reads Round 1 of 5, and scores accumulate into one total.
How is the score calculated?
By distance in years. A guess of 1930 against a true 1918 keeps 242 points. The further you land, the less you retain.
What years can the photos come from?
The slider spans 1900 to 2025, so a full century and a quarter is in play on every round.
Can I play more than once a day?
Yes. Beside the Daily there is an Unlimited mode for endless rounds and a Party mode for playing against other people.