Crown Aerial Film Library
The Crown Aerial Film Library is an important national taonga. It preserves, in snapshots, changes in the national landscape and the story of the New Zealanders living in it. This is a unique and crucial record of 84 years of New Zealand history.
The Library comprises nearly 700,000 photo negatives from 7,300 aerial surveys flown between 1936 and 2008, as well as contact prints and other associated materials. Photography was captured for a range of purposes including photogrammetry and topographic mapping, Defence training, land management, and town planning.
From 2014 to 2023, LINZ led a collaborative programme to digitise the film negatives in the Crown Aerial Film Library. Creating digital versions of historical photographs aids long-term preservation and enables access to historical imagery for use in multiple applications.
The Crown Aerial Film Library historical imagery scanning project.
The NZ Aerial Photo Footprints, Mainland NZ, (1936-2005) polygon layer on the LINZ Data Service contains metadata for every photo frame in the Crown Aerial Film Library. This is the only comprehensive record of all items in the collection. Approximately 60% of the records have footprint geometries, with the remainder identifiable through metadata text search.
NZ Aerial Photo Footprints, Mainland NZ (1936-2005) on LDS.
Abley’s Retrolens website provides an interactive interface for searching and viewing many of the surveys in the Crown Aerial Film Library. These images are available for download at a smaller resolution than the original scans.
Full resolution scans, survey charts, and calibration files may be requested, email: imagery@linz.govt.nz.
Orthorectified historical surveys
Historical aerial surveys that have been orthorectified to produce spatially accurate orthophotos are openly available via the LINZ Basemaps platform and in the NZ Imagery S3 bucket which is on the Registry of Open Data on AWS. This supports a wide range of applications including environmental analysis, land use planning, and historical landscape change detection.
Registry of Open Data on AWS - New Zealand Imagery.
If you work at a council that is interested in publishing their region’s orthorectified historical surveys on LINZ Basemaps, email: imagery@linz.govt.nz.
There are key vector products we ask you to request which support the publication process.
Commissioned NZ orthophotos
Orthophotos commissioned by LINZ from 1994 to 2006 have also been made available from the Toitū Te Whenua archive. From 1994 to 2003 these orthophotos were created to align with NZMS260 map sheet extents. From 2003 to 2006 the extents align with Topo50 map sheets.