RootsChat.Com

It's easy to turn all that stuff on or off in Google Earth.  Here's a sample with everything turned off except my own pinned locations.  I could turn on street names, political boundaries, etc., as needed.  All of this is done in the Layers menu on the left side of the Google Earth screen.  The most offensive junk [Oasis Bar and Grill, McDaniels Auto Repair, etc.] is removed by turning off the 'Places' option.  It's also easy to zoom in or out and to rotate the map to show the place from a different angle.

"The only way I can get in is by clicking on Unread Posts."

I hit refresh a few times and it eventually gets me in.

"And where would be the fun in that?"

Precisely.  The detective work is the fun.  An AI bot is not fun.  Equally, bots can crawl through the web and produce a classification of all living things, their geographic distribution, their life histories, their behavior and their morphology, but it is much more rewarding and enjoyable to actually look at animals and plants in person.

There is a large collection of digitized newspapers (mostly but not all from New York) at Fulton History.  It's free.

https://fultonhistory.com/Fulton.html

I'm curious about what people characterize as a "very old photo."  To me, it would be Civil War era or earlier, or maybe just make the cut at 1870.