Geography

The University of Oregon Libraries’ Aerial Photography Collection contains approximately 1,000,000 unique images, primarily paper prints but also original film and digital photographs. Our earliest images are from 1929. The majority of the photographs were taken in the 1930s up to the 2000s. They cover all of Oregon and some of other surrounding states, especially western Washington.

The images were mostly flown for federal, state, county, and municipal agencies such as U.S. Department of Agriculture, Bureau of Land Management, National Forest Service, U.S. Army Corps of Engineers, and Oregon Department of Revenue. However, we also have two extensive private sector collections: Brubaker Aerial Surveys/Delano Aerial Surveys/Northern Light Studio out of Portland and WAC, Inc. out of Eugene, Oregon. Scales range from 1:3,680 to 1:80,000. Availability of specific years, scale, altitude, resolution, color, stereo pairs, and time of year varies depending on area of interest. The majority of our collection is vertical photography but we also have oblique imagery of the Portland area from the 1980’s to the late 1990’s.