Opening a treasure trove: The Historical Aerial Photography project
summary
Geoscience Australia’s archive holds about ~1 million historical aerial images from the 1920s onward, with roughly 200,000 images (≈20%) digitized so far; flight-line diagrams are ~80–90% georeferenced but the film digitization is slow, manual and costly (cold storage, specialist scanners). An API-only service is built in Python 3 using Django REST Framework, serving paginated JSON with STAC-like temporal queries, a denormalized star-schema for fast search, CC-BY imagery and Apache-2 code; more funding needed to complete scanning.
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chapters (10)
- 0:00Introduction to project
- 1:05Historical aerial photography archive
- 2:33Challenges of historical data
- 4:23Flight line diagrams and metadata
- 6:32Film digitization process
- 7:35Cross-jurisdictional collaboration
- 8:18Open data and technical standards
- 10:51Search capabilities and data model
- 13:18Project goals and funding needs
- 13:41Q&A session
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