February 2016

A Landmark Moment for Vintage Aerial

Posted on 02/01/2016 by Fritz Byers in Company Updates

This is a landmark moment for Vintage Aerial. We are excited to share it with you, and we want to tell you a little bit about it.

After seven years, we are finally able to share our vast collection of historic aerial photographs with you in the way we’ve always intended – by making them available to you directly, allowing you to enjoy, study, and share them in the ways you want to, whenever you want to. And if you want to own a photograph – a print or a digital file – you can buy directly from our website using a streamlined, hassle-free online process. We’re here to help if you need it, in any way we can – ask for help, share your stories, join our communities, lend support in identifying photographs and enriching knowledge about the stories they tell. But now, and into our future, all of the choices will be yours.

This is the company we have wanted to be since we began in 2009. In that time, we’ve been busy. We’ve built from scratch a unique, robust process for converting our millions of film photographs to digital images, geolocating them with speed and precision, helping you find them with whatever historical information you may have, and displaying them to you. And we’ve converted more than 10 million of our 25 million pictures so they can be accessed through this process. Of course this has taken time, and we still have lots of work to do – converting another 15 million images (along with other collections we’re busily tracking down) geolocating them through our internal process to ensure we present them to you as accurately as possible and in the most accessible way.

As you may know, until now we’ve not had enough of a full-service digital library, and enough accompanying software tools, to be able to make our collections directly available to you in the ways we’ve dreamed of. So, while we’ve been building the company, we enlisted help from many trained outside Librarians who helped you and others find photos and navigate our process. You may have worked with a Librarian, and, if you have, we hope that in all ways your experiences were rewarding. We honor all they’ve done for us, and we’re grateful. But from the start, our vision has been to remove the barriers – human and technical – that stood between you and the photos you want to see.

We’re far enough down the road now to act on that vision. So, beginning today, all of your connections with Vintage Aerial can be directly online. If you want to see photographs that are meaningful to you, visit us and begin looking. Large swaths of our collection are directly accessible now through our automated search functions. Enter your information, and the site will find them for you and display them. If the photo you’re looking for isn’t yet part of the fully functional online archive, leave us a quick request, and we’ll get on it immediately, and we’ll promptly let you know by email that the pictures you’re looking for are ready, and we’ll send you the link.

Of course, if you want our assistance, we’re here to help in any way we can.

So, we are thrilled to be able to offer you an online collection of aerial photographs, available to you 24/7. That’s Vintage Aerial as we’ve always dreamed it.