The problem
Chile's visual memory is scattered across shoeboxes, deteriorating family albums, and hard-to-access institutional archives. The photos exist, but without context: nobody knows where they were taken, who appears in them, or what year it was. Every passing year the paper degrades a little more — and the generation that could identify those places and faces is no longer around to tell the story.
What we did
We built Chile de Ayer as our own product: a collaborative digital archive that democratizes Chile's photographic heritage. Anyone can upload a historical photo and the platform restores and colorizes it with AI, right in the browser. Exploration works by decade, theme, visual search, and a map of Chile where every photo is geo-referenced.
The community is the engine: a points system rewards uploading photos, tagging locations, and adding context, with a contributor ranking and a "help needed" section for photos that don't have their story yet. Beyond photography, the platform also rescues audiovisual material — period commercials, interviews, and documentaries.
The outcome
A living, growing archive with material from the 1800s onward, used by teachers, researchers, and families looking for their own history. For Freshwork it's also the end-to-end proof of what we sell: applied AI where it adds real value — restoration, colorization, visual search — on top of a custom-built web platform, from discovery to deployment.