Old Postcards and San Diego Redrawn by AI: What Each Captures and What Each Misses

Every time I open my desk drawer, a bundle of faded postcards catches my eye. Printed sometime between the 1950s and 1970s, most of them were picked up for less than $1 each at flea markets or vintage shops. Some still have someone's handwriting on the back; others have spent decades without a stamp ever being affixed. It was earlier this year that I had the idea: what if I scanned these postcards one by one and then used an AI image generation tool to recreate the same locations? Today, I'm sharing the results of several months of on-and-off work since then.

The comparisons all involve places within San Diego, streets I pass through every day, the coastline where I take weekend walks, a historic station where trains once stopped. When you place a vintage postcard's version of a location side by side with AI's reinterpretation of the same spot, it becomes pretty clear what each medium holds onto and what it lets slip away.

Balboa Park, 1962 Postcard vs. AI

One of my most treasured postcards in the collection is a Balboa Park one. The sky is printed in a saturation close to purple, and a few small figures stand on the lawn in front of the California Tower. Maybe because of the printing technology typical of the 1960s, the tree shadows bleed into a deep navy blue, creating an atmosphere far more dramatic than reality. Flip the postcard over, and there's a short message, "Wish you were here," along with an Arizona address.

Using this postcard as a reference image, I asked the AI to produce the same composition. My prompt included "1960s color palette, California Tower, late afternoon light." The result was remarkably clean. It convincingly reproduced the decorative tile patterns on the tower, and the sky tones were close to the postcard's oversaturated look. But something was missing. The clothing of the people standing on the lawn in the postcard, a small object that one of them may or may not be holding, the slight smudge where the printing ink bled just a bit. The AI recreated the place, but it couldn't produce the traces of someone who had actually been there.

Santa Fe Depot, Light and Shadow

The Santa Fe Depot is one of my favorite buildings in downtown San Diego. Since I have a strong interest in the history of public transit, I own three postcards of this station, one of which appears to date from the late 1940s. The white walls and red tile roof in the Mission Revival style look as if they're practically glowing under the intense California sun, and the car parked in front of the station gives away the era.

When I attempted the same angle with AI, the architectural details were actually more accurate on the AI's side. The proportions of the arched windows, the curves of the roofline, the color of the tiles. The vintage postcard had lost much of its detail through the printing process. But the postcard had something the AI could never reproduce: the texture of the road in front of the station. The way light smeared across the asphalt, the tire marks left by cars that had passed over it. The postcard's camera may not have intended it, but it captured the physical quality of a road from that era in its entirety. When you tell AI to draw "an old road," it responds by adding a few cracks, but that's not actual texture. It's closer to an illustration of the concept of "oldness."

There's one more thing you notice when you study the postcard closely. The spot where the person who took this photo must have been standing, the view they would have seen as they raised the camera, the split second decision to press the shutter. A single postcard contains the physical presence of the photographer. AI has no body.

Ocean Beach Pier, What Color Tells Us

The Ocean Beach Pier postcard is probably from the early 1970s. The colors lean slightly orange, giving an impression quite different from the actual cold, grayish sea at Ocean Beach. Fishermen on the pier appear as tiny dots, and a single seagull is captured in the sky, slightly blurred because it was in motion.

When I asked the AI for the same scene, the pier's structure came out accurately, right down to the grain of the wooden planks. The sky was rendered in the 1970s film tone I requested. But when I asked it to include a seagull, the AI's seagull was too sharp. Every feather pattern on the wings was crisp and clear, a frozen seagull. The sensation conveyed by the blurry seagull in the postcard, that feeling of "this was actually moving," was completely lost.

A thought kept coming back to me throughout this project: the charm of vintage postcards comes from the combination of what was intended and what was not. The postcard makers set out to show San Diego beautifully, but the limitations of printing technology, the limitations of the camera, and the weathering of time layered upon that intention, giving rise to a beauty that was never part of the original plan. AI gives me exactly what I ask for. That is AI's strength, and, when it comes to imitating vintage postcards, its structural limitation.

This isn't to say the AI results are inferior. There were plenty of moments I marveled at what AI could do. When I asked it to transform the Balboa Park postcard into a night scene, the image of the California Tower with its lights on and the reflections below came remarkably close to my own memory of the actual night view. When I asked it to take the Santa Fe Depot back to its 1920s opening day appearance, the scene it produced (Ford Model Ts lined up in front of the station, people dressed in period clothing arranged plausibly throughout) was a sight that would have been hard to imagine just by digging through historical records. Postcards show what was; AI shows what could have been. Both are real, and both are incomplete.

Lately, I've been expanding this comparison project into digital collages. I cut out parts of postcards and layer them over AI-generated images, or vice versa, placing a section of an AI image on top of a postcard. Alternating between Midjourney and photo editing tools, I'm searching for the visual tension that emerges at the boundary where the two media meet. I haven't produced many results I'm satisfied with yet, but one image where the blurry wing of a postcard seagull transitions into AI's crisp sky turned out quite well.

The postcards in my drawer are proof that someone once visited this city, was moved by it, and tried to capture that feeling on a small piece of paper to send far away. The images AI creates are a record of the things I imagine while living in this city right now. I enjoy the time I spend looking at them side by side.