Saturday, May 2, 2015

Saturday Night Genealogy Fun -- Guessing Ages in Photographs

It's Saturday Night, 
time for more Genealogy Fun!!


For this week's mission (should you decide to accept it), I challenge you to:


1)  Go to the "How Old I Look?" website (
http://how-old.net/#) and upload one or more of your photos of yourself, your family, or your ancestors.

2)  Show us the results on your own blog post, on Facebook or Google+.  Please post a link to your post as a comment on this blog post.

3)  Come on now, be brave and show us your photos.  You don't have to tell your age, only how many years off the guess is.

Here's mine:

1)  I did my own with a 2014 photo (I was age 71):



So it missed my age by 7 years.

2)  I did myself with a 1969 photo (age 25):



It missed my age by 2 years.

3)  I did Linda (a 2014 photo):



It missed her age by 10 years.  But it was the right way!

4)  I did my family in 1976:



It missed the ages by 12, 2, 45, 8 and 7 years.  My brother Scott looks really young here, and it guessed he was age 66!  Who knew?


5)  My Carringer grandparents in about 1970:



It missed the ages by 13 and 12 years.

6)  A Carringer/Smith group photo in 1920:


It missed the ages by 3, 8, 15, 14, 13 and 10.  I guess it doesn't work for cat ages...

So the average miss in guessing the ages of the folks in these pictures was 181/16 = 11.3 years.

How did I make the images?  I used the Windows Snipping Tool and saved the image to my hard drive before uploading them to the blog post.

The URL for this post is:  http://www.geneamusings.com/2015/05/saturday-night-genealogy-fun-guessing.html

Copyright (c) 2015, Randall J. Seaver

8 comments:

Louis Kessler said...

Randy,

Thanks for doing this for everyone. It's interesting and potentially a very valuable technology to help identify the date and people in old photos.

You might also want to add to your blog which of the genders it got wrong.

Louis

Nancy said...

Hi Randy, Thanks for the exercise in photo-aging. I had fun! I just noticed that the only genders that were incorrect on mine were me and my cousin, Marilyn. Not sure how to take that part. LOL!
Here's my link:http://www.indianaties.com/2015/05/saturday-night-genealogy-fun-old-i-and.html

Geolover said...

Interesting. The site does not do well for gender of boys still in skirts pre-1920 . . . ;)

Lois Willis said...

This was interesting and fun - it certainly didn't do well guessing my age when I was younger!
Here's my link
http://loiswillis.com/?p=4134

Mike J said...

"I guess it doesn't work for cat ages..."

It probably has an issue working out which life the cat is currently on :-)

Pam Carter said...

Here are some of my photos - some good, some bad, some ugly!

http://mymaineancestry.blogspot.com/2015/05/how-old-do-you-look-saturday-night.html

Unknown said...

It guessed my age as 70, I am sixty-five. LOL!

catkinson54 said...

I did a picture of when I was 35 and it made me 37. I did a picture of when I was 57 and it makes me 36, LOL. Not a very accurate program. Could not figure out how to post the picture either.