Aerial Photography and Remote Sensed Imagery: Home

The Map and Government Information Library maintains a large collection of aerial photography of the State of Georgia, consisting of over 240,000 photographs from the late 1930s through the early 1990s. The aerial photographs in the collection were produced by a variety of state and federal agencies, including the U.S. Department of Agriculture and the U.S. Geological Survey.

In this guide you will find Information on how to request photos from our collection, where to find our digitized indexes, and how to find a photo of your site of interest. Use the Sources for Air Photos and Related Collections tab to browse online resources for aerial photos and satellite imagery. The UGA's ASCS Inventory tab is a table of our holdings for photos by county; you can use this tab to determine if we are likely to have the photo that you are looking for in our collection.

Our aerial photos by county are available by request only. Photos in our physical collection can be viewed in MAGIL and scanned using our flatbed scanner. Any of our digitized photos will be provided in lieu of a physical copy and the file will be sent to the provided email. Please view our full policies regarding aerial photo access. 

You can request photos from our collection via a request form, online or at our service desk. 

• Types of information needed from the photos for a request: 
  • County name 
  • Year 
  • County code – Flight line number – Photo number 

Please keep in mind that we do not have every photo for every year and just because we have the index, doesn’t necessarily mean we have photos for that year.

The Georgia Aerial Photograph Index Collection provides access to digital versions of all county indexes in MAGIL’s physical collection. 

• The scanned 1993 indexes also serve as an inventory, as they only show the photos we have available. 
• MAGIL also has the statewide set of USGS NAPP photos from 1988. An index to the set is available here. All 1988 photos are digitally available upon request.

DLG instructions:

• Use the search bar or the "Georgia County" facet on the left-hand side of the page to find the county that you want.
• Click the item for the corresponding year. 
• Some counties will display a stitched-together index for the entire county, others will be split into separate sheets shown below the image.
• Scroll to zoom into the sheet with the area that you are looking for to find the individual photo information.

Find area on Index 

• The index is the key to determining which photo(s) will cover the target area. The index is a mosaic of the photos from that flight. The index includes a rough county outline.  
• County highway maps from the same time period are helpful; Google Maps is a good tool to help determine your site's location. 
• Finding a specific site is easier if you don’t start with the earliest photos. Use the index that is most recent to get started, because the early indexes have more farmland and fewer landmarks. 

Individual Photo Information 

• Each photo has four pieces of information (date of photo, county, flight line/path, and the photo number); you want to pay attention to the flight line and the photo number on the photo that covers your site when you look at the index.  
• Also, because there is about 2/3 overlap of photos, you might want to save yourself time and write down the numbers of the photos that border the initial photo. Your area might appear on all of the photos, or we may be missing some of the photos.