Manchester Archives needs your help to pinpoint our photographic collections! This is your chance to contribute your knowledge of Manchester, and to become a part of the city’s archives.

We have now uploaded over 3000 images onto Flickr to share them more widely and enable people to share their memories with us. We’ve also mapped over 800 of them – you can browse our map here (scroll right on the thumbnail bar to see more images). But we need your help to continue the project.

Using Suggestify to place images on the map is easy and your input is automatically acknowledged on our photos. You’ll need a Flickr account to do this. Just choose ‘Select a location’ and enter ‘manchesterarchiveplus’ and you can submit locations for our mystery photographs. Any tags already attached to the photos might help to locate where they were taken.

If you’d prefer not to use Suggestify, you can simply tweet us the Flickr url along with either a map url or the longitude and latitude coordinates, using the hashtag #mapMCR. Or comment on the image on Flickr with the same info. We’ll then add your suggestion to the image metadata, and credit your input.

Sometimes it is difficult to work out where a historical photo was taken because the streets and buildings in the area have changed down the years. Using the Manchester Historical Maps site you can overlay the current street map of Manchester with a variety of different historical maps to identify where a demolished street or building once was.

Station building, Chorlton cum Hardy, 1960 (demolished)
Station building, Chorlton cum Hardy, 1960 (demolished)

One such tricky location is this image of the station building at Chorlton cum Hardy, taken in 1960 (but since demolished). Using Wikipedia, you can find the latitude and longitude co-ordinates for where the station was (click on the coordinates at the top right and copy and paste them from GeoHack), and then we can easily input this into the metadata for the image on Flickr.

Keyword tagging is also easy to do. Again you’ll need to have a Flickr account, which you can get with a Google, Yahoo or Facebook ID. The best bit is there are absolutely no rules! This means that you now have the power to curate our archives. You can also add your information and reminiscences to them through the comment function.

Let the geotagging begin!

Look out for project updates on Twitter. See our website for information about Greater Manchester County Record Office (with Manchester Archives).