About Timescrolly

Scrolling through time

A timeline is usually a picture: a fixed strip with a fixed span, drawn once and stuck that way. Here, zoom is the whole idea. There is one continuous axis, and the scale you see is simply where you happen to be standing on it.

Scroll out and you are looking at eras - millions of years stretching only a few pixels. Scroll in and the same timeline resolves into decades, then days, then the three things that happened one afternoon.

That is where the name comes from. Time is something you scroll through, and a timeline should let you travel it at whatever speed the story needs.

Why it exists

Most tools for this were built for project plans: a few months, a handful of bars, dates that are always exact and always recent. Point them at the fall of Rome, a family tree, a geological record or a long investigation and they come apart. They cannot do BCE, they have no way to say that something happened sometime in the 1340s, and they treat an event as a label rather than as something with sources, photographs and a place on a map.

So the hard parts came first: dates at any scale and any precision, events nested inside the periods they belong to, items carrying media and proper citations, a map view of the same story, and a viewer that stays smooth while you drag across a few billion years. Sharing, collaborators and teams are built on top of that, because the timelines worth making are usually made with other people.

Who makes it