Colorama lets you explore true color photographs from the early 20th century on an interactive map.

Before WWII, color photography was too expensive and cumbersome for mass adoption. But a handful of enthusiasts had been experimenting with early color processes since the turn of the century. Colorama is a showcase of their work.

The first batch of photos featured on Colorama comes from the Archives of the Planet collected by Albert Kahn. Between 1908 and 1931 Kahn sent photographers around the globe to capture a disappearing world in vibrant color using the Autochrome process. I will add more collections from other sources soon.

The Musée Départemental Albert-Kahn has digitized Kahn's collection of more than 60,000 autochrome photos and also published the geolocation data for 50,000 of those photos as an open dataset.

I enhanced the open dataset by applying AI models to the metadata. For non-georeferenced photos I used Large Language Models (LLMs) to extract precise location information from the captions which could be processed by a geocoder. I also used LLMs to translate the captions from French to English.