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MAGIC - Connecticut Historical Aerial Photography

MAGIC's aerial photography collection

View aerial photography index maps - County Coverages—1951 to 1995         

View other online Connecticut aerial imagery 1934 , 2004

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Welcome to the University of Connecticut Map and Geographic Information Center (MAGIC).  MAGIC has over 35,000 paper aerial photographs of Connecticut in its collection.  Over the past three years MAGIC's staff has scanned, geo-located, and created metadata for this collection.

Historical aerial photography is a great tool for understanding and observing changes in the landscape over time.  Our collection is used by a variety of people, such as geographers, environmental engineers, historians, and has applications for town and city planners, developers, and ground water scientists.  

How this site works - Users with access to a geographic information system (GIS) can download the shapefiles for a certain year for a specific county.  Personal geodatabases are also available for each county as well. The attribute table of the specific feature class contains links that take the user to the image or metadata of the photograph.

Users without access to a GIS can view aerial photography index maps to see what images are available in the MAGIC collection.  Currently the collection has photography from 1951, 1969 (for selected counties), 1970, 1985, and 1995. 

Aerial photography, shapefiles, and personal geodatabases come with Federal Geographic Data Committee compliant metadata.  Shapefiles and Personal Geodatabases are projected in Connecticut State Plane, NAD 1983.  Aerial photography is not geo-rectified.

For step-by-step instructions on how to download the GIS data and view the images please download this document - How to view Connecticut Historical Aerial Photography , and Creating GIS Hyperlinks.

Please read MAGIC's disclaimer regarding historical aerial photography digital collections

Acknowledgements

Aerial Photography Over Time

Click here to see more examples of changes over time using historical aerial photography

Storrs, Connecticut

1951 (TIFF Format)

1970 (TIFF Format)

1995 (TIFF Format)