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For the past 20 years, Julie Thomas has been photographing Wisconsin Avenue, taking roughly 1,000 pictures to catalogue major changes such as building heights. But during the last few months, she's trained her camera on Chevy Chase homes, preserving their images for posterity.

"I just did it because everything was changing so rapidly," said Thomas, 65, a lifelong Chevy Chase resident.

Thomas and other volunteers are almost finished with a two-year project for the Chevy Chase Historical Society that requires a frontal-view photograph of every home in the five Chevy Chase municipalities of Section 3, Section 5, Martin's Additions, Chevy Chase Village and the Town of Chevy Chase. This adds up to pictures of more than 2,500 residences.

The Historical Society hopes to have pictures of all Chevy Chase Village homes within two weeks, and pictures of every Town of Chevy Chase home by the fall, with pictures of the other three municipalities already complete.

These pictures will be included in the Historical Society's ongoing project to place all of its pictures, maps and oral histories on its Web site. When complete, the online archive will have about 11,000 entries.

Evelyn Gerson, chairwoman of the technology section of the Historical Society, said the project got started because of the rapid pace of architectural change taking place in Chevy Chase, although she said it's not the society's role to pick sides on issues such as mansionization.

"We don't take a position on that change. Our job is to just capture it and just save it for posterity," said Gerson, a Section 3 resident.

The group is also looking for any older photographs of Chevy Chase homes that residents may have.

The photography has largely taken place this summer and last summer. Thomas, a Historical Society board member who also manages the group's oral history project, said she began taking pictures in May and has tried to pick cooler days to do it. While the summertime may lead to more beautiful shots, the tree leaves sometimes obscures good views, making it necessary to take two or three pictures from different angles.

Despite recent controversy over building limits and styles and the accelerating rate of change, Thomas said many homeowners have done a good job preserving the architectural integrity of homes that may have been torn down.

"Some of the homes that have replaced them have been very tastefully done," she said.

During her strolls in Chevy Chase Village, she has seen Victorian, classical and Georgian homes predominate, while in her eyes the Town of Chevy Chase has a more eclectic mix including Tudor and brick colonials.

She said she occasionally gets asked what she's doing by residents, but she considers it a good sign that they are keeping a sharp eye out in the neighborhood.

While Thomas can easily put the recent changes into perspective, this is harder for Daniel Button, 21, a Chevy Chase resident and student at Montgomery College who first got involved in the project after attending a Historical Society seminar. So far, he's taken pictures of about 200 homes this summer, mostly in the Town of Chevy Chase.

Like Thomas, Button said he gets stopped sometimes by people wondering what he's up to. But once they understand the project, they can become surprisingly communicative, he said.

"Once they understand, they're very accepting. They start talking about their homes and the historical significance of their home that they know about it," Button said.