Vantage
Cape Ann · Portland, Maine · work in progress
Stand where they stood.
Fitz Henry Lane, Winslow Homer, Childe Hassam, Edward Hopper and the old postcard photographers all set up on these shores. Vantage pins their pictures to the spot, then lets you hold your phone up and see the painting laid over the real view.
Free. No ads, no account, nothing to install.
How it works
Pick a picture
Every pin marks where an artist or photographer stood. The shaded cone shows which way they looked.
Walk there
Follow the distance readout to the spot. Pins are marked documented, inferred or general, so you know how sure we are.
Ghost it
Open the camera and the painting floats over the scene. Fade or swipe between then and now, and save the pair.
Free, and staying free
Vantage is a personal project. There's nothing to buy and no account, and it doesn't track you. Your position stays on your phone.
- The pictures are public domain, from The Met, the National Gallery, Cleveland, the Library of Congress, NYPL and Wikimedia Commons. Credits are on every pin.
- Vantage's own work (pin locations, notes, calibrations and text) is shared under Creative Commons Attribution 4.0. Reuse it, remix it, just say where it came from.
Buy me a coffee
Hunting down where Lane set his easel in 1862 takes old maps, catalogue notes and a lot of walking. If Vantage made a walk better, a coffee keeps it going: more towns, more pictures, better pins.
Spotted a pin in the wrong place, or know where a picture was painted? That helps just as much. Line it up in the ghost view and export the calibration.