Cornell University Library Digital Collections

New York State Aerial Photographs

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About this collection

This collection presents a series of historical aerial photographs of the state of New York.

Historical context

The Cornell Institute for Resource Information Sciences (IRIS) maintains a large and comprehensive collection of aerial photographs for New York State dating from 1936 through 1995. The archive numbers some 50,000 images that cover 48 counties, many counties of which have at least three years of historic sequence. The photographs are primarily black and white direct contact prints, and in hard copy form they measure from 7” x 9” to 9” x 9” in size; scales vary.

Historic aerial photographs are valuable resources for landscape and land use analysis, assessment of environmental impacts, development projects and education. Although these images are not geo-referenced, they are nevertheless useful instruments for exploring the past by examining changes in properties, neighborhoods and land use in general. In addition, historical, chronological, environmental, or architectural information about particular sites over a period of time can also be examined. Although discrete points on the earth’s surface are not referenced, one can roughly compare land changes when these aerial photographs are examined from year to year.

Using the collection

The metadata in this collection is tagged by county and by year. Use the Location facet to browse by county, and the Date facet to browse by year.

More information

Collection steward
(Vacant)
Metadata creation
Eugenia Barnaba, Kayla Baker, Colleen Gloster-Gray, Susan Hoskins, Stephen Smith
Funding
Funding provided through the Institute for Resource Information Sciences (IRIS); Cornell University Library Faculty Grant for Digital Library Collections: Advancing E-Scholarship; awarded in 2005 to Eugenia M. Barnaba, Program Leader, Cornell Institute for Resource Information Sciences; Kathryn Gleason, Michael Tomlan, and Stephen DeGloria; and a Smith-Lever Grant.
Credits
This collection overview was last reviewed in 2025.