Image IndexMark

What is it?

The image index is a searchable PDF file which contains brief descriptions of all the negatives that were originally in the collection.

If you’ve read the background information, you’ll know that descriptions of the air photos were stored in three books. Up to now, searching for a particular area has meant flipping through some 200 handwritten pages looking for keywords in hopes of stumbling across the area. Now, all three books have been transcribed into a single PDF file.


First, some disclaimers:

  • The collection is not complete. Some negatives were lost, destroyed or sold to clients. Just because a entry exists for a negative, doesn’t mean the negative exists. This PDF index will be a “work-in-progress.” As we come across missing negatives, they will be marked off in the PDF file with a strike-thru font, like this: Bo-47-2001
  • Descriptions may not be entirely accurate. We’ve already come across images that were several blocks off of where the description said they were and some others that had a completely different city.
  • All the information in the index books was hand-written. In some cases, it was very difficult, if not impossible, to decipher the handwriting. In these cases, we have put a ? after the word to notate that the word shown is a guess of the letters. If you think you know the word, please fire off a message from our contact page and we’ll update the PDF.
  • I highly recommend sticking to low altitude imagery. Something marked “Low” or around 1000′ is always going to have much more ground detail than a Med or High image. In fact, I would try to stay away from anything marked High or 10000′ or greater because there will be so little detail that the image wouldn’t be very useful for anything more than an “overview.”

Once an image has been scanned and posted online, it will be marked in green to show that it is complete.

If an image is marked in yellow, this means it’s not very good. It could be that it was flown at a very high altitude and doesn’t show much ground detail, or that it is of poor quality and I would prefer not to scan it, but if you really need it, I will.


Download Image Index PDF File