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Restroom Archive
- T3RMINATED 16d ago[dead]
- kerblang 16d agoWhy are the toilets (and other things) melted? Is this some artifact of the photography?
- kannanpoem1984 16d agocool project and great work !
- Mbarley 17d agoCould generate some truly unique datasets. Anyone else immediately think of 'graffiti as a service' or toilet paper consumption stats?
- accountrequired 17d agothis is why we cant have nice things
- shrinks99 17d agoWhat are you talking about, this IS a nice thing!
- mrweasel 16d agoI'd probably reword that and ask: Why do people feel like trashing restrooms or not feel like they shouldn't clean up after themselves?
- globular-toast 16d agohttps://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Somebody_else%27s_problem https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Somebody_else%27s_problem
- Nzen 16d agoOn the clean hand, are the trustworthy tools there for me to plunge out a big poop or wipe a bit of overspray ? I sometimes see a plunger, but don't ever bring rubber gloves and a roll of paper towel that would make me feel comfortable cleaning up a nasty toilet. On the dirty hand, I used to see (evidence that) someone clog(ged) a one of the toilets in an office building that I shared with lawyers, once a month or so. I developed a head canon that this person acted out their dissatisfaction with the lawyer or counterparty on the rest of the building.
- jakewelch 16d agoHey this is my project. Thanks for sharing
- dolmen 15d agoIt would be fun to have this connected to other world mapping projects such as Panoramax which is a federated alternative to Google Street View. https://panoramax.fr/ https://panoramax.fr/
- binarymax 16d agoWow this is amazing! I had a habit of visiting the nicest bathroom I can find (typically 5 star hotel lobbies) while traveling. I took some photos of a couple a long way back, but never even thought to use something like LIDAR. I was thinking of using them as a coffee table book with the title "The Best Places To Go". So from a fellow public bathroom enthusiast, I wholeheartedly thank you for this project. I travel much less these days, but if I'm ever in a nice bathroom I'll see if I can get a scan to work and upload it!
- jcalx 16d agoThank you for making it! This is an incredible project so I hope to see (and contribute!) more scans. Also just a really well-crafted website in general, functionally and aesthetically. You mentioned looking at "standard design conventions used for other web archives and for designing public signage for ADA compliant restrooms" in another comment — any interesting design decisions from that research?
- jakewelch 16d agoYeah! It lead me to design the UI to be very simple with a clear hierarchy, high contrast, and using a sans-serif font. Accessibility and legibility is key. I landed on using Arial as the font because it's arguably the most accessible. Beyond that, my research drove the language I use throughout. "Catalog", for example, used to be "Index". or calling comments "annotations". It's funny, something about the subject matter being so stupid made me want to go really hard on taking the archive itself 100% seriously.
- 16d ago
- ziofill 17d agoGeorge Costanza would be proud
- v9v 17d agohttps://restroomarchive.com/r/2026-08-29-grand-army-plaza-automatic-public-toilet https://restroomarchive.com/r/2026-08-29-grand-army-plaza-au... > has a countdown timer above warning visitors that the door will auto-open in x amount of time. A toilet that has a door with a countdown seems like the most stress-inducing thing ever.
- stronglikedan 16d ago> A toilet that has a door with a countdown seems like the most stress-inducing thing ever. It would be more stressful to the people who are standing there watching me finish my shit than it would be to me, I guarantee.
- Doohickey-d 16d agoIt's quite common in Europe. Usually you get 15 minutes which seems fairly generous.
- deleted 16d ago[deleted]
- brettermeier 16d agoWhat, where? Never saw this.
- Sander_Marechal 16d agoI've been all over Europe and I have never seen this....
- yitchelle 16d agoI have seen a couple of them in Cologne.
- abcd_f 16d ago... et voilà, we now know where the GP is from :)
- 16d ago
- lorenzohess 17d agoPublic bathroom sinks are always way too small. Google Maps should integrate with this service to incentivize larger sinks.
- DimmieMan 16d agoIncentives to not have said small sinks perfectly curved to splash straight into your pants would be appreciated too.
- malkia 17d agoYou can see one of the authors here in the mirror :) - https://restroomarchive.com/r/2024-12-02-the-mart-collective https://restroomarchive.com/r/2024-12-02-the-mart-collective
- b112 16d agoI wish this was a for-profit corporation, because for some odd reason I want a job of traveling across Canada, and documenting every public restroom that exists. It'd almost be like an episode of the Littlest Hobo. Each week I'd roll into town, bent on performing my job and documenting restrooms. But in the end I'd save some woman, or orphan, or somebody that's having a horrible problem in their lives, and then I'd roll on to the next town. Except... in my series, I'd always get a piece of homemade pie as thanks, before I left. Which sort of brings us full circle: https://m.youtube.com/watch?v=Ayo9PoZgrMU https://m.youtube.com/watch?v=Ayo9PoZgrMU
- embedding-shape 16d agoMake it into a Youtube channel, create Patreon, fund the first few months yourself and you've created your own travel show :) Be the change you wanna see in the world, it's never too late!
- starvar2 17d agoThis is very cool!
- ChickeNES 16d agoShit like this makes me feel like I am back browsing Fark 25 years ago (pun intended :P)
- computerfriend 16d agoDoes anyone have a recommendation for an open source photogrammetry application for Android?
- stavros 16d agoEspecially one that can produce rooms like this!
- timonoko 16d agoKiri Engine with AI and Splats might be even better on this.
- jubilanti 16d agoThere are like a half-dozen Android phones with LIDAR and most are from 2019-2021 when the AR craze was in full swing (Samsung S21, Pixel 6), while all the iPhone Pros since 12 have it.
- downoutnah 16d agoThat's a great idea. It would be nice to have an archive of restrooms in Korea too.
- jakewelch 15d ago[dead]
- keiferski 16d agoPublic bathrooms are such an interesting public services issue. In some places it’s totally normal to pay a small fee, and in return you (usually) get a clean space. In other places, the idea of paying to use the bathroom is considered an offense against the public. Years ago when I was in New York often, I had the idea to make a paid bathroom app, with a bit of a luxury twist. You’d pay $30 or whatever a month to have access to 40+ well-designed bathrooms across the city. The idea was that we’d own and operate these, and they’d be extremely well-designed, have beautiful tile interiors, come with a variety of hygiene products, water bottles, and so on. I still think it could work, but over time I began to dislike the idea, as it would have been yet another example of the public commons essentially being eroded and replaced with a privatized paid system. Not that NYC public bathrooms are even remotely nice to begin with… but I think a better solution would be less deliberately exclusionary. Then again, what could be more NYC than the idea of paying money to get better things?
- arjie 16d agoI thought this sort of thing was what CEPTIA successfully campaigned against? Also, what is the public commons that's being eroded in this scenario? Public toilets are few and far between but also kind of don't seem like a commons. I'd imagine a commons is something like a fishery or something. Pretty easy to control access to toilets. They have doors and as most European countries have proven, you can charge for the access to those doors.
- keiferski 16d agoYeah I’m sure there would be a regulation against it, and you’d need to brand them as rest centers or something. And I think public access to toilets, at least in NYC, should probably be something more like the subway system than a service just for those that can pay a lot. Even then, the subway isn’t really a life need in the way a toilet is. (Yes I’m aware that it costs money to ride the subway, but it’s not very expensive.) I can imagine the service I described being branded by the press/public as bathrooms only for the rich. As I said, norms around this aren’t the same around the world. It’s normal to pay for a toilet in Europe but many Americans have a negative reaction to the idea.
- timonoko 16d agoOnly in America: Door knob so you cannot use your sleeve to exit sanitarily. Also obligatory fluffy and sticky floor mat is missing.
- Flavius 16d agoIt's actually everywhere. Europe is full of door knobs. We're trying to make sure that everyone touches as many surfaces as possible. Next step would be tongue operated doors and switches.
- timonoko 16d agoDoor knob seems to be british-american thing? Gemini: You've spotted a real historical and geographical divide. Door knobs are predominantly an Anglo-American standard, while lever handles dominate continental Europe, Scandinavia, and much of the rest of the world.
- IAmBroom 16d agoCongrats. You've used artificial intelligence to guess wrongly about something you don't know about.
- timonoko 16d agoSituation Critical in Sweden: Jag vill ha runda "Door Knobs" till mina innerdörrar! Finns det att hitta i Sverige och fungerar det till våra kantiga dörrpryttlar (ja, du vet de där som ser till att dörren hålles stängd. Vad sjutton heter det??)?
- deleted 16d ago[deleted]
- jimbob45 16d agoI feel like the US has been pretty good at installing foot-knobs (if you will) in new bathrooms. That seems to be the most hygienic strategy, no?
- alfiedotwtf 16d agoWow! I have always wanted to archive the graffiti in pu pic toilets, but this 3D capture is a million times better! Now I’m wishing more public spaces inside and out were archived forever like this - imagine we had this 1000/2000/3000 years ago and seeing how it was like back then!
- kromokromo 16d agoHigh quality photo archive of public bathroom walls with curated text describing the grafitti like fine art would be something I could spend hours consuming.
- otherayden 16d agoLove this, you need some more east coast johns outside of NYC though :(
- shireboy 16d ago3d splatting takes on a different meaning in this context.
- khernandezrt 16d agoFinally, something i can contribute to!
- Super3000 16d agoI appreciate the Word 97 Brutalism Design of the website.
- jakewelch 16d agoI did a lot of research on the standard design conventions used for other web archives and for designing public signage for ADA compliant restrooms!
- graupel 16d agoIt's so randomly weird that a bunch of these are in Utah and I have personally visited them, including one in my neighborhood last week! Some days the Internet is so....local.
- jakewelch 15d ago[dead]
- ghostbrainalpha 16d agoMe too. I felt like I know half these bathrooms. Did you click on the map view to see the route he is driving?
- paimapi 16d ago> https://restroomarchive.com/r/2026-08-31-tri-cities-airport-basement https://restroomarchive.com/r/2026-08-31-tri-cities-airport-... incredible work. I can only imagine what it was like standing here getting the images, the smell of the must wafting from the corners that haven't been cleaned in a decade, the microbial colonies thriving off pipe condensation above with entire universes of births and deaths and rebirths 1000/10, every bathroom is an entire story
- jareklupinski 16d agoyou're getting me sentimental about the last time i scrubbed the tiles :(
- vivzkestrel 16d ago- not a single bidet in sight, sigh - would be nice if there was a flag hasBidet = true or false for each of them
- skinfaxi 16d agoI love this! Years ago I had an idea to catalogue "bathrooms around the world" which would include some very strange urinal positions. We need to expand to Europe and get Crown and Treaty imaged.
- jgalt212 16d ago> Of the many victims of Bernard L. Madoff, the Ponzi scheme mastermind who died in prison April 14, was a visionary entrepreneur: George Costanza, whose app, iToilet, directed its user via global positioning technology to the nearest acceptable public toilet anywhere in the world. Or so runs the plot of the fictional “Seinfeld” reunion. https://forward.com/culture/467735/george-costanza-lost-it-all-to-bernie-madoff-seinfeld-curb-your-enthusiasm/ https://forward.com/culture/467735/george-costanza-lost-it-a...
- waltwalther 16d agoYou can also click and drag to rotate the images, in some cases even a view from the floor up.
- henryrobbins00 16d agoThis is awesome. It reminds me a lot of the excellent work done by the Center for Land Use Interpretation (CLUI) [1]. One of my personal favorites is Pavement Paradise [2] documenting American parking spaces. I'll also shamelessly plug some pictures of gas stations I took last summer :) [3]. [1] https://clui.org/photo-archive https://clui.org/photo-archive [2] https://clui.org/projects/pavement-paradise https://clui.org/projects/pavement-paradise [3] https://henryrobbins.com/artwork/gas-stations/ https://henryrobbins.com/artwork/gas-stations/
- furyofantares 16d agoMy kid has a major fear of restrooms. I wonder if we can use this site as exposure therapy or if it will only be more fear inducing given how tiny and messy most of them are, plus the messiness of 3D capture artifacts.