01/03/2026

Letter to the Cultural Affairs Officer of Beirut

Dear Mayor or Cultural Affairs Officer of Beirut

We are contacting you to offer completely free of charge a new website for old photos of Beirut.

It is likely that your locality already has one or more traditional or social media pages where old images of Beirut are already shown, but Oldpik offers innovations and advantages that we think may be of interest to you:

  • It is an open bank of images of Beirut, both residents and the City Council itself can send photographs.
  • The images appear with their description and date and can be sorted chronologically, by theme, or by upload date.
  • Following the photos of Beirut, on the same page, those of the nearest localities will appear Basta et Tahta, Greater Beirut Area, Khannâq Hmâra, El Maqâssed and At Tayāminah
  • The images of Beirut will appear contextualized in higher geographic categories such as your province page, your autonomous community, your country and even continent or the entire world.

We are actually inviting Beirut to be part of the first bank of old images from around the world that has been created on the Internet. Oldpik does not aim to show famous old photographs but rather to transfer to the web the millions of photographs that citizens have in paper format in cookie or shoe boxes and that these become part of the history of the last two centuries. You cannot imagine the hundreds or thousands of photographs of your locality that are in the hands of individuals and that, together, can create a truly impressive historical heritage for Beirut. And at no cost.

From your institution in Beirut you have two ways to be part of this wonderful project:

  1. Helping residents digitize images from your own organization and uploading them to Oldpik with your own user account.
  2. Encouraging the residents of Beirut through social networks to digitize their photos and share them on the Beirut page of Oldpik.com

OLDPIK / BEIRUT
https://oldpik.com/place/asia-lebanon-beyrouth-beirut

Thanking you in advance for your interest in this project and hoping to count on your collaboration, we cordially bid you farewell.

José Miguel López
Roberto Santana