Residents and fond visitors of York, we need your help! If you are missing the sights and streets of our beautiful city during lockdown, then join our caption challenge to explore it in photographs! We have 900 images of York in need of identification and dating (approximate dates are fine). Drawing on the collective knowledge of our community, we will then upload the photographs onto our new Explore York Images website, sharing more of York’s unique history with the world.

Some of the photographs are easy to identify, some are not so easy. This will be a great way to test how well you know York! In some cases there will already be information on the image – for example, we may have the name of the building but not the street. In other cases, there will be no identifying information at all.

How to join the challenge

We will be releasing 100 new images a week (on Wednesdays) over the next 9 weeks – starting 29 April.

If you are not a member of Flickr, then you will need to join here to add comments.

You can view the images by visiting our Flickr gallery here. Once you are a member of Flickr, you will be able to participate.

You can add information about any of the photographs by clicking on the image and using the comment box below. Feel free to add whatever useful information you can. Do you know something about a business that appears in an image? Do you recognise any people or a particular building? Most importantly, where is it and when was it taken?

To share your progress, you can Tweet us at @YorkArchivesUK and use any of the following hashtags #captionchallenge #missingyork #exploreMORE #LibrariesFromHome

Thank you and good luck!

• archive project
• History of York