This came up at SotM while talking about some old aerials of SLC: we don’t have a good way of discovering this type of resource.
There are a ton of for-profit services that have sprung up to provide access to old aerials, but that’s not of interest. Free, publicly-available aerial layers are what we’re after. Ideally, this would be some sort of WMS/WMTS endpoint so that we can add the layer to iD or JOSM for additional mapping.
A forum post is generally a horrible way to inventory these things, but why don’t we put some here and we can collect / collate them separately. More likely (or not?), there’s some big list of these somewhere and we can ours to that list.
Possibly covered by the US National Archive link above, but there are apparently some declassified satellite images that are available online. Rough footprints are browsable online, but the images themselves have not been georeferenced. I don’t know the license situation. One thing I read said they were originally declassified to help with environmental studies, but I haven’t checked to see if they are usable only for specific purposes. I have not tried to create an account to download any yet.
From the coverage shapefiles, they seem to cover most of the world.
USGS EROS Archive - Declassified Data - Declassified Satellite Imagery - 2: A collection of declassified military intelligence photographs from the KH-7 surveillance and KH-9 mapping satellite systems in digital format. (1963 to 1980). Note: “High Resolution Scanned Images $30.00 per frame” (but only if not yet scanned?)
USGS EROS Archive - Declassified Data - Declassified Satellite Imagery - 3: A collection of declassified military intelligence photographs from the Keyhole (KH) satellite system KH-9 (Hexagon) in digital format. (1971 to 1984). Note: “High Resolution Scanned Images $30.00 per frame” (but only if not yet scanned?)
These are very cool & this list is a great resource. Our biggest issue right now is the difficulty of using IIIF - neither of our primary editors, iD and JOSM, support a direct connection to IIIF sources. So, in the mean time, we’re stuck with WMS, WMTS, and xyz tiles, which is a whole lot of maps to be “stuck” with. We can use IIIF maps georeferenced in allmaps.org, as it has an xyz shim built in that we can use. The problem right now is that the georectification that the xyz layer uses doesn’t employ a high fidelity warping algorithm and the results can be a bit dicey. We hope to get IIIF thin plate spline (which allmaps has) to the xyz tiles in the near future, but there’s no date set yet.
( Same here. The Chronoscope is also stuck within my pragmatic solution to use either IIIF w/o warping or fixed size images. Corner control points are not yet compatible with freestyle ground control points. And IMO tiling –regardless of xyz or iiif– provides a poor user experience. You should really add epileptic trigger warnings. )
Anything that’s authored by the U.S. federal government and published publicly is automatically in the public domain in terms of copyright law. This is a little murky because “public domain” in the context of classification normally means whether the public knows about something, not whether they can copy it. Irrespective of copyright, the agency can also charge for a copy of the work if it isn’t readily accessible online. But the imagery was taken by a government agency, declassified, and posted online, so I don’t think we have reason to be concerned about IP rights. The USGS provides an online viewer for this imagery.
But some in the US as well.
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