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Historical aerial imagery

Historical aerial photography is one of the strongest spatial records of twentieth-century landscape change in Aotearoa.

LINZ's Crown Aerial Film Library contains nearly 700,000 negatives from about 7,300 surveys flown between 1936 and 2008. The collection was created for purposes including photogrammetry, topographic mapping, Defence training, land management and town planning.

Find a photo​

Retrolens​

Retrolens provides an interactive search/view interface for many Crown Aerial Film Library surveys. Its downloads can be lower resolution than the original scan.

LINZ photo footprints​

The NZ Aerial Photo Footprints, Mainland NZ (1936–2005) layer in LDS is the comprehensive catalogue record for the collection. LINZ notes that about 60% of records have footprint geometry; the rest can still be found through metadata/text search.

Full-resolution material​

LINZ says full-resolution scans, survey charts and calibration files can be requested through imagery@linz.govt.nz where needed.

Orthorectified historical surveys​

A growing set of historical surveys has been orthorectified and published through LINZ Basemaps and the NZ Imagery AWS bucket. Prefer these when available because they avoid repeating georeferencing work.

Research applications​

  • trace river-channel movement
  • identify former wetlands and drains
  • compare marae/building development
  • locate old roads and tracks
  • document forestry cycles
  • examine coastal/dune change
  • compare subdivision and urban growth
  • test a documentary hypothesis about a kāinga or historical feature

Aerial photography records visible surface evidence at a moment in time. It does not establish who used a place or what it meant.

For manual alignment, use Retrolens historical imagery workflows and Georeferencing historical maps.

Official source: LINZ historical aerial imagery.

Last reviewed: 26 August 2026

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