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Aerial Photographs and Imagery

Digital Aerial Photographs

ATTENTION

  • As of Spring 2024, we are no longer fulfilling requests for higher resolution images beyond what is currently offered online, due to minimal staffing.
  • We will gradually work toward hosting higher resolution images, which will be free to download.
  • Terms of use will not change.
  • Please visit our Digital Services page ​​​​​for more information.

 

Hawaiʻi

We have one aerial survey per decade for much of Hawaiʻi beginning with the early 1950s. Our primary sources include photographs issued by the United States Geological Survey (USGS), United States Department of Agriculture (USDA), and the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration (NOAA). Approximately 10,000 aerial prints, dating from 1950-2000, were lost in flood, and most were replaced in digital format; 500 additional image files were purchased from NOAA after the flood with Hawaiian Collection funding.

 

Aerial Photos 1950-2000

  1. Click on the image below. This opens a web map of the Hawaiian Islands.
  2. Turn on and off flight lines in the list of layers in the left column
  3. You will see lines of red dots. Each dot represents the center point of an aerial photograph. Click on a red dot close to your area of interest.
  4. You can view or download 300 dpi resolution jpeg images for free, by clicking on the metadata popup.

Click on image for interactive index map

 

Aerial Photos 1940s (USGS Oahu SE)

  1. Click on the image below. This opens a web map of Oahu.
  2. You will see lines of red dots. Each dot represents the center point of an aerial photograph. Click on a red dot close to your area of interest.
  3. You can view or download 300 dpi resolution jpeg images for free, by clicking on the metadata popup.

Click on the image for an interactive index map.

Aerial Photos 1927/28 (Oahu and Kauai)

  1. Click on the image below. This opens a web map of Oahu and Kauai.
  2. You will see options to view dots and footprints. Each dot represents the center point of an aerial photograph. Click on a dot close to your area of interest.
  3. You can view or download 300 dpi resolution jpeg images for free, by clicking on the metadata popup.

Click on the image for an interactive index map.

Pacific and Asia

MAGIS is in the process of digitizing, organizing, and creating access to its aerial photographs collection. Currently, we have roughly 8,000 digitized aerial photos, mostly USGS and US Navy aerials of Hawaiʻi and selected Pacific Islands dating from the 1920s to the 1980s. Click on the Pacific and Asia heading above to access the file server. Note, if flight line indexes are available, they usually file at the beginning or end of the directory.

USGS Hawaii and Pacific Aerials

Approximately 4,000-5,000 aerial prints, dating from 1920s-1980s. Prints were donated to MAGIS post-flood by the local USGS office. Two major components - Hawaii and Pacific Islands. The Hawaiʻi component includes a unique collection of USGS prints (Oahu only) from the 1920s. Some Hawaiʻi aerials have been digitized and are available through the index maps in the "Hawaiʻi" section. The Pacific Island component includes prints of Wallis, Marshalls, Ponape, Truk, Marianas, Yap, Palau, American Samoa, and the Solomons.

Alele Museum and National Archives Marshall Islands Aerials

The Alele Museum and National Archives donated over a 2100 print and digital aerial photographs of the Marshall Islands from the 1940s, 1960s, and 1970s. MAGIS has digitized and made available online 271 print aerials primarily of Jaluit and Wotje Atolls. Approximately 2000 aerials that were digitized and donated by the Alele Museum are available online in PDF and cover the atolls of Ailinganae, Ailinglaplap, Ailuk, Arno, Bikar, Bikini, Ebon, Enewetok, Kwajalein, Lai, Likiep, Majuro, Maloelap, Mili, Namorik, Namu, Rongerik, Taka, Ujae, Ujelang, Utirik, Wotho, and Wotje.

Worldwide

Dynamic World

"Near realtime 10m resolution global land use land cover dataset, produced using deep learning, freely available and openly licensed. It is the result of a partnership between Google and the World Resources Institute, to produce a dynamic dataset of the physical material on the surface of the Earth. Dynamic World is intended to be used as a data product for users to add custom rules with which to assign final class values, producing derivative land cover maps." -- Dynamic World

Google Earth Engine

"Google Earth Engine is a cloud computing platform for processing satellite imagery and other geospatial and observation data. It provides access to a large database of satellite imagery and the computational power needed to analyze those images. Google Earth Engine allows observation of dynamic changes in agriculture, natural resources, and climate using geospatial data from the Landsat satellite program, which passes over the same places on the Earth every sixteen days. Google Earth Engine has become a platform that makes Landsat and Sentinel-2 data easily accessible to researchers in collaboration with the Google Cloud Storage. Google Earth Engine provides a data catalog along with computers for analysis; this allows scientists to collaborate using data, algorithms, and visualizations. The platform provides Python and JavaScript application programming interfaces for making requests to the servers, and includes a graphical user interface for developing applications." -- Wikipedia

Landsat

Landsat represents the world's longest continuously acquired collection of space-based moderate-resolution land remote sensing data of the Earth's surface to a broad and varied user community, including agribusiness, global change researchers, academia, state and local governments, commercial users, national security agencies, the international community, decision-makers, and the general public.

  • EarthExplorer (EE)
    EE is the primary search interface accessing aerial, mapping, elevation, and satellite data held in the USGS archives, including Landsat data products. Before downloading data products, users must complete the user registration at the EROS Registration System.  Some functions of EarthExplorer will work only after a successful login.
  • Global Visualization Viewer (GloVis)
    The GloVis Viewer is an easy-to-navigate browse-based tool that displays all available Landsat scenes held in the USGS archives.
  • LandsatLookViewer
    Interactively explore the Landsat archive at up to full resolution directly from a common Web browser