Historical Imagery

Retrace Montreal's Footsteps: Exploring Aerial Imagery from 1950

Year
2023
Project
Personal
Stack
GDAL, Pillow, Mapbox
See the project  

The Project

The city of Montreal has shared on its open data portal the archival aerial photographs belonging to the geomatics division. More than 22,000 photographs are listed there, covering the period from 1930 to 2003. After verification, the first aerial flight project that covers the entire territory of the island of Montreal appears to have been carried out between 1947 and 1949. However, although a summary geographic index is available, these images have never been georeferenced and made available to the public in a single map.

I automated the georeferencing of the few thousand images from the 1950 project, and integrated them into a web application for exploration. The application allows you to search for a location, and then use a slider to compare the 1950 territory to the 2023 imagery.

Contact me by email if you would like to access the georeferenced images for a project.

Sources

Archives de la Division de la géomatique
Photothèque: 1930-2003

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