Two coders used old photographs to make a Google Street View map of San Francisco in the 1800s - and it's mesmerizing

If you've ever wondered what it'd feel like to travel back in time and walk the streets of San Francisco, this might be the closest you'll get - at least for now.

Two developers, Dan Vanderkam and Raven Keller, had the brilliant idea to take all the old photographs from the San Francisco Historical Photograph Collection and put them on a interactive map. This map functions similarly to Google Street View, except for when you zoom in on a particular place it gives you photos from as far back as 1850.

The project, which is called OldSF, lets you manipulate a slider to change the range of years (it goes from 1850 all the way up to 2000). The pair have geocoded about 13,000 images.

Visit the site here, or look below for some of the best photos we saw from the 1800s, marked with their locations in the city.