• Historical buildings (demolished) - click here
• Historical buildings (existing) - click here
• New development - click here

I spent some time in the BC Archives and clicked through several thousands of images. In total, I bookmarked 232 pages from the Archives, using my diigo account. My bookmarks on diigo are typically private (i.e., cannot be viewed by third parties), but in the interest of research and learning, I decided to make my recent finds public. So, click on this photo_doc tag to see all 232 bookmarks pointing at BC Archives pages containing Victoria images of interest. But wait, it gets better, thanks to the miracles of social annotation and ...tagging! Click on this 1970s tag to see the 12 bookmarks pointing to images from the 1970s; and so on for the following decades:
1960s (3 bookmarks)
1950s (13 bookmarks)
1940s (66 bookmarks, and some real gems here.... Note: pay attention to street-view/ street preference in all the photos from the 1940s and earlier, vs. an automobile preference, the latter being especially detectable in the 1970s photos.)
1930s (7 bookmarks)
1920s (19 bookmarks)
1910s (30 bookmarks)
1900s (14 bookmarks)
1890s (36 bookmarks)
1880s (4 bookmarks)
1870s (14 bookmarks)
1860s (16 bookmarks)

A note on the wonders of diigo: view my bookmarks (the public ones, above) and note that there's a blue "expand" button/ link next to each bookmark. Click on that to see whatever annotation and/or sticky I added to the bookmarked page (I'm reasonably sure that the annotations and stickies are also public now, although they were originally private). Click on the blue title for the bookmark, and it takes you to that page. (diigo is by invitation, but I have quite a few to distribute: if you want to start your own diigo account, let me know and I'll send you an invite...)

(Ooops: it seems that the "expand" button/link does not appear after each bookmark, which might be due to the bookmarks having originally been marked as "private," and when I converted them to "public," my annotations didn't make it. I'll try to fix that, check back tomorrow or later this week....)
Further update: it is indeed the case that annotations made while the page was private but then converted to public don't travel well, so I'm afraid that they won't be available any time soon. For an idea of what some of them were about, however, see the just-added Sex in the City page....

A note on copyright: BC Archives has copyright on these images. It's ok (IMO) to create a link that points to their website's thumbnail as well as larger photos, but it's not ok simply to rip the image and put it on your webpage without permission. The images should be readily available (again, IMO), but the Archives claims copyright, so it's best to play nice and comply.

Next step: comparisons to current street scenes// buildings...

See the Sex in the City page, too...