Historical Airphoto Information

The historic air photos of Minnesota available from this site are contributions from a wide array of data partners including:

MnDNR Section of Wildlife
MnDNR GIS Section
MnDNR Division of Forestry, Resource Assessment Office
McLoed county GIS department
St. Louis County Land Department Resource Data Group
Oblique photography was funded in part by the Coastal Zone Management Act, NOAA's Office of Ocean and Coastal Resources Management, in cooperation with Minnesota's Lake Superior Coastal Program
Historical Information Gatherers Inc

Thanks to those individuals who have contributed to this effort.

Scan specifications

Resolution ranges from 600 to 1200 DPI
JPEG format.
Black and White or Color is OK
256 Shades of grey or full color imagery
Birds Eye or Obliques
Image names follow the form: project_roll_image.jpg aitk_1_1.jpg - aitkin county, roll one, image one.

DNR has the capacity to add additional imagery to this collection and can adjust to most situations. We do require shapefile point indexes that indicate the center of each photo for images to be posted on this site. Required shapefile attributes are:

Filename - 64 character string to store the path to the image filename
Provider - 24 character string to store the organization providing the images
Project - 16 character string which references the project abbreviation on the image
Year - 4 digit long that stores the year of imagery collection
Photo_id - the photo ID as shown on the Photo, for example, aitk_1_1
Ext - 4 character string that stores the file extension without the period.
XUTM - 8 digit Long representing the X UTM Coordinate of the photo center
YUTM - 8 digit Long representing the Y UTM Coordinate of the photo center
Status - 1 digit short to represent that the photo has been scanned, 0 - no or 1- yes
Photo_Date - the date of the image

View historic air photos through the Air Photos Online tool, part of Landview

If you are interested in contributing data or are interested in funding additional scanning and referencing please contact:

Hal Watson
GIS Section Manager
651-259-5508
[email protected]