We partnered with the Miami Herald—witness to 100 years of Florida history—to develop the Flashback Miami mobile app. It combined the paper’s vast archival holdings with interactive maps, guides, and games to help visitors explore and understand Miami’s rich past—and connect it to the present. The project was made possible by generous support from the Knight Foundation.

Flashback Miami enabled visitors to experience current sites in the context of historic images, discovering points of interest along family-friendly trails through hotspots like South Beach and Coral Gables. One popular route on the app followed locations from the 1980s hit TV series Miami Vice.


Connecting with history through modern technology

When visitors arrived at a designated stop along one of the mapped trails, the app unlocked a digital vault of hidden gems: exclusive, unpublished photos from the Herald archive, videos, trivia, and additional interpretive information about the site. Flashback Miami also allowed users to upload comments and images, empowering visitors and the local community to share their own stories, photos, and feelings about the places they experienced utilizing the app.

History can be hard to appreciate and connect with today’s world. Flashback Miami united modern technology with historic images to help bring a century of southeast Florida heritage to life.