Crowdsourced repeat photography & timelapses
Ephemeros — free on Android & iOS
Ephemeros is collaborative re-photography: you stand where someone stood previously and take the same photo. The two line up, and the time between them starts to move — a coastline retreating, a skyline rising, a garden filling in.
Skip to the use cases ↓How it works
1. Find a spot near you
A spot is a documented frame — fixed coordinates, compass heading and tilt — that anyone can find again. The map is full of them; tap one and shoot.
2. The ghost does the hard part
The last photo floats over your camera as a see-through ghost, with live compass and tilt guides. Line up the skyline and you're there.
3. Then watch it move
Every capture rebuilds the spot's timelapse automatically. Come back in a season and the place is visibly, undeniably different.
4. Or start your own
One baseline photo starts a new spot. Create spots only where you have lawful access — and get the landowner's permission on private land.
Pick your use case
Same app, same aligned photos — but what makes them worth taking differs by audience.
Climate Change Research
A growing, open dataset of aligned repeat photography — with the environmental metadata to make it usable.
Learn more →Coastline & Shoreline Shifts
Erosion, accretion and storm damage, captured from fixed viewpoints along the shore.
Learn more →Construction & Development Projects
Groundbreaking to ribbon-cutting: a fixed-frame record of your build.
Learn more →Ecological Restoration & Rewilding
Prove your restoration project works — with a public, aligned photographic record.
Learn more →Heritage & Historic Preservation
A photographic condition record for the buildings and places worth keeping.
Learn more →Hikers & Trail Communities
Give your favourite viewpoint a memory — and see it in every season you missed.
Learn more →Land Owners
Your land, year by year — pasture, water, veld and fences on the record.
Learn more →Local Government & Public Works
Transparent, time-stamped visual records of public assets and public spaces.
Learn more →Schools & Citizen Science
A real scientific instrument your class can run with a phone.
Learn more →Seasonal Change & Phenology
Leaf-out, bloom, harvest, leaf-fall — the calendar of nature, photographed on repeat.
Learn more →Travellers
Leave more than footprints — add your frame to the places you visit, and watch them change after you fly home.
Learn more →Urban Decay & Neglect
Document potholes, abandoned buildings and neglected public spaces — with evidence that grows over time.
Learn more →Urban Growth
Watch neighbourhoods and skylines rise, one aligned photo at a time.
Learn more →Wetlands & Waterways
Water levels, reed beds and river health — monitored one repeat photo at a time.
Learn more →Public, private, or just your team
You decide who can see a spot, and who fills it. Some people want the whole town photographing their high street; others want one paddock documented by three colleagues and nobody else.
Public spots
On the map for everyone. Anyone who passes can add the next photo, so a viewpoint keeps getting photographed long after you stop visiting it. Each spot has a QR code and a printable sticker for exactly that.
Private spots
Yours alone — off the public map, out of the exports, invisible to strangers. Share one deliberately by adding it to a list, and only that list's members can see it.
Lists for a team
Group spots into a list — your street, your reserve, your project — then invite friends, a class or colleagues. Members can be allowed to add spots of their own, and everything they capture feeds the same record.
Either way the photography is crowdsourced rather than scheduled: the public or your team take the photos, the app keeps them aligned and generates timelapse videos.
Data for researchers
Whatever the use case, the data underneath is the same
Every photo is captured in-app, moderated, aligned onto its spot's baseline frame and enriched with the weather it was taken in — public images can be exported through the Researcher API under CC BY 4.0, ready for analysis.
Start recording change today
The best time to take the first photo was years ago. The second-best time is now — and every photo after that gets more valuable.
