2015

After months of hard work I’m proud to announce the new VintageAerial.com!

In addition to looking and working great on mobile phones, tablets, and desktops, this redesign also has a few new features that show you more of our collection and why we think it’s so important.

Mobile and Tablet Friendly

When we launched Vintage Aerial more than 7 years ago iPhones, iPads, and Android didn’t exist. Today, more than 50% of our traffic comes from these devices.

Every page has been redesigned to fit small mobile screens, tablets, larger desktop screens, and everything in between. There have also been a few thoughtful touches to make navigating more friendly on mobile and tablet devices.

Decades of Change

A lot has changed over the past 50 years. We’ve gained a lot of technological innovations that make all this possible, but we’ve also lost a lot of history. Only 50% of farms in America from 1960 remain, and the rest have undergone dramatic change.

That’s why we created Decades of Change. Our homepage now features just a few farms with photos from the 1960s, ‘70s, and ’80s showing just how much of our rural landscape has changed. We’ll continually add new photos here from our collection of millions.

Featured Stories

We’ve always thought our photos are a catalyst for memories and we love hearing your stories. We’ve redesigned our featured story pages to showcase more of our photos that are bigger, sharper, and look amazing on retina displays.

Our photos, your stories, together with that of your neighbors paints a rich picture of what rural America really was like.

More to Come

This is just the beginning. We have plans for even more ways for you to explore our collection, and we’re excited to share them with you.

If you have any questions, comments, or suggestions for how we can continue to improve, please leave a comment below.

We’re releasing 400,000 more images from our collection in Ohio!

Ohio is our home state, and we’re on track to open all images in the state by this summer! We’ll keep updating our blog with a list of recent openings for your convenience.

Help us spread the word to people who have roots and connections in these areas. We’re looking for volunteers to help us identify photos and leave stories.

We’re excited to announce another 92,000 images available for browsing on the West Coast!

The vast majority of these photographs are being released without approximate locations because the original flight path maps have been missing for decades. This means that in order to geolocate these images so that we can allow visitors to search by address or keyword, we need the help of people in these areas to help us identify photographs!

Here’s a look at what happens when photos are geolocated. Even in areas missing map data, we can recreate flight path maps when visitors pin locations. Once enough photos have been identified, we can enable visitors to search these areas by address and keyword!

Our hope is to crowdsource the identification of these photos, which means we need help spreading the word that they exist. If you, or anyone you know has a connection to any of these rural areas, let them know they can begin browsing through our collection from the 1960s.

At Vintage Aerial, we’ve been working hard to turn our vision into reality, which we feel is encapsulated in our mission statement:

As a result, we’re on track to make nearly 2 million photographs available for searching and browsing by the end of this June! Our hope is that anyone with a connection to rural America will use our collection to reconnect with their past by viewing our photos and sharing memories with us.

The list below contains the states and counties we’ve made available as of today. Enjoy!