When my wife and I combined our photo libraries later in life, we found a photo of the two of us, back-to-back at a ball a few years before we first met.
I wrote software to find minimum spacetime distance between camera rolls using embedded GPS. It runs all client side if someone wants to try it out or take up the mantle.
https://github.com/Lucent/photo-distance
My wife and I were apparently at a party of a mutual friend two years before we met. Neither of us remembers the other being there. Apparently being the guy who brought an Apple IIc and a box of floppies to a college party in 2009 wasn't memorable enough!
Aww so sweet. I love stories like this. My wife and I met by chance in Seattle in 2014, having grown up on different coasts, but there was a period in the 1980's where we lived <50 miles apart and I always wonder whether we ever met by chance as kids. That's so amazing you found that photo. We will have to combine photo albums like you and see what we learn.
There's a reddit comment where the poster recalled, how his parents would take the family on far away cities for vacation. The parents would then do parent things and the kids would just walk around the cities. In several different cities in several different vacations, he and and his sister would run into this kid. After a few times, the kid would run being freaked out, but the poster and his sister managed to "catch" him once, and introduced him to their parents. It turns out, the poster's parents knew the kid's parents, and at vacation times, the sets of parents would travel to the same location and partner swap with each other...
> The parents would then do parent things and the kids would just walk around the cities
Apart from the final plot twist, this was surprisingly normal when I was a kid in the 1970s. The number of times my sister and I were left sitting outside a pub, either at a picnic table or even waiting in the car while the adults were inside having fun...
Similar, but also with Google's help: on the second date with my current girlfriend, we took a selfie. Google Photos then identified her face from a picture I had snapped five years previously... it turned out we had already met at a wedding, had a somewhat tipsy and flirtatious conversation, but since we then lived a long distance apart, and I was still disentangling myself from a previous relationship, I didn't make an attempt to follow up at the time, just left with a vague memory of "cute girl in city X, it would have been nice to get to know her under different circumstances." Now I live in city X and the circumstances are so much better :)
I spent a week working at the Inmos plant in Colorado Springs in 1989, thousands of miles from where I lived at the time. It turns out I drove past my wife's house every day that week. We didn't meet until 1996.
I went to school with the brother of my older brother's girlfriend; in an old picture of me on graduation day, she's in the background to attend her brother's graduation. This was 17 years ago, I believe they've been dating for about ten years now.
The last person I dated and I figured out we had probably been literally face to face a couple years before at an event, and I was probably talking to her boyfriend about something.
