Resource of the Week: Historical Aerials
By Shirl Kennedy, Senior Editor
Here's another time-sink for you. How could you not love this site?
HistoricAerials.com provides free online access to historic and current aerial photography. You can view aerial photography from the 1930s through today. Use our multi-year comparison tools to detect changes in property.
If you just want to look at cool aerial pictures, scroll down to the bottom of the page, to Points of Interest. Click on the Show Categories link. Those who regularly follow us on ResourceShelf know that we kind of got lost looking at aerial pictures of sports stadiums old and new, such as:
(We were, however, less than crazy about the fact that after choosing a category to browse and clicking on an image, we were basically bounced out of that category when the large-size image was displayed, and we had to go back and start all over again.)
Of course you'll want to click on the Oddities category, although right now, there are only four images available -- Michael Jackson's Neverland Ranch (2005), a blimp and its shadow (1957), Airliner in Flight (2002), and the ever-popular "Boneyard" of mothballed aircraft at Davis-Monthan Air Force Base (2004)
Other imagery categories include: airports, American cities, amusement parks, construction, landmarks, mansions, military, states, Texas, zoos. Some categories have only a few images. Others are stocked with more.
If this was just a collection of static aerial imagery, it wouldn't be much different from other, similar sites like Bird's Eye Tourist, for example. But Historical Aerials has a variety of tools that allow you to search for a geographic area, manipulate the images, extract more information from them, and look at images from the same location over a number of different years. A detailed FAQ describes how to do such things as pan, zoom, find latitude/longitude, measure distance, etc. You can choose to overlay roads, counties and cities.
Note from the U.S. map on the home page that historical imagery (back to 1930, in some cases) is available only from certain limited geographic areas -- indicated in dark green. "Modern" imagery of the light green areas covers the years 2003-2008. When you initially display an image, labels on the right side indicate which years are available. You can use a slider tool to compare images from two different years.
Note also that the images have the Historical Aerials logo on them. You can purchase logo-free images, which may then be used for publications, etc.
Historical Aerials comes to you from Nationwide Environmental Title Research, LLC (NETR). You may already be familiar with their excellent directory of links to free online public records searches. (They also offer a variety of fee-based public records searches and information.)
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