topic Re: Old Aerial Photos in Data Management Questions

Old Aerial Photos

EduardoMachicado — Sat, 03 Jul 2010 12:30:53 GMT

Hi there, I'm an archaeologist preparing a survey in the Bolivian Amazon. I ran into a stack of old (but in mint condition) aerial photography (from a flight around 1963 I think) that I'd like to scan an add to the geodatabase. I''ve done this before but I was wondering if anyone out there have some tips on what would be the best way to scan the pictures, any specific settings with the scanner? best formats? any other recommendations?
I will appreciate any comments on experiences doing this.
Thanks a lot.

Re: Old Aerial Photos

ToreBorvik — Tue, 06 Jul 2010 07:09:22 GMT

I've scanned old airphotos for an area in peru. I scanned them using 900 dpi with TIFF format, and the digital result was very good. It took about 10-15 minutes to scan each photo.

unfortunately its a while ago, so I don't remember the rest of the scanning parameters I used.

My photos was a time series with 10 year interval from 1949 to 2009. I had some issues comparing the rasters after georeferencing since the resolution of the old photos were worse than the newer ones (and also physical changes in the terrain, such as changed stream of a meandering river)

Re: Old Aerial Photos

AndrewPihlaja — Tue, 06 Jul 2010 12:09:02 GMT

I have done the same thing, except for a National Park in Canada. I had the same year intervals (10 years from 1949-2009) and I used the same settings listed above. I think it was an HP scanner. Saved the scanned photos as TIFF's and georeferenced them. Hope everything works out for you.