Dear Photograph started off as a nice nostalgic blog with six pictures of old family snaps lined up in their original setting. Then it went viral.

ast May, Taylor Jones was sitting with his family in Ontario when his mother pulled out an old photo album. Among the hundreds of shots was one of Jones’s younger brother at his third birthday party. “He was sitting in front of his Winnie-the-Pooh birthday cake,” Jones recalls. “It was weird – because my brother was there, in the exact spot he was sitting in in the photograph.”

Jones grabbed his camera and took a shot of the old photograph lined up to match its original location. He posted it and six others on a blog. Within days, the blog, which he later named Dear Photograph, had gone viral. Today, eight months on, Dear Photograph has had 10m hits, and been named one of Time magazine’s 10 best sites. It now gets 20,000 hits a day.

The success has enabled Jones to leave his job in Ontario with RIM, makers of BlackBerrys, where he worked as a social media specialist. He recently spent time in LA, finishing a book inspired by Dear Photograph that will feature stories to go with some shots. He has also met film and TV executives to discuss projects based on the site such as a screenplay a friend wrote about using photographs to travel into the past.