We’re excited to announce the integration of high altitude aerial photos into our collection at Vintage Aerial! These historic vertical photos come from a variety of sources, mostly government organizations, and serve as the perfect historical complement to our collection of oblique, low altitude views. These newly added photos, some from as early as the 1930s, offer a stunning view into how vast areas of America’s landscapes have changed in the century since.
Since learning of the availability of these photographs, the small team at Vintage Aerial has been developing software and processes to gather, organize, precisely geolocate, mosaic, and present these vertical views. Unlike our own collection, which we’ve scanned from the original film archives we’ve acquired, these newly added images have already been scanned in extremely high resolution. And they have been available in various places for some time. But until now, they have been difficult to find, navigate, and make sense of. The work our Vintage Aerial team has done on these images, including geolocation and mosaicking, allows us to layer these images on top of contemporary maps and imagery, and allows our users to browse them in a familiar online map interface.
Today we’re releasing the first batch of our work. This release includes over 322,000 square miles of imagery covering Ohio and Pennsylvania, the two states in which we have the largest number of photos in our own historic collection. The imagery spans the 1940s to 2000s. In the coming months we’ll process and release additional states, years, and imagery sources to augment our own collection of oblique aerial photos.
| (sq. mi. of imagery) | 1940s | 1950s | 1960s | 1970s | 1980s | 1990s | 2000s | 2010s | 2020s | Grand Total |
|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|
| Ohio | 332 | 26,158 | 27,449 | 65,299 | 666 | 0 | 0 | 22,302 | 7,526 | 149,732 |
| Pennsylvania | 4,363 | 25,220 | 52,556 | 73,936 | 8,627 | 1,053 | 6,701 | 13 | 0 | 172,469 |
| Total | 4,695 | 51,378 | 80,005 | 139,235 | 9,293 | 1,053 | 6,701 | 22,315 | 7,526 | 322,301 |
We’ve also incorporated National Agriculture Imagery Program (NAIP) imagery into our county and photo-page maps for several years, which makes viewing changes over the years even more striking.
We’re thrilled to present these newly added images to you in this unique way. We believe this additional content will make it easier to find, locate, and enjoy photos in our collection that until now have not been geolocated. And we believe that these images are an interesting resource of its own, a fascinating perspective on the ever-changing American landscape.
