The National Air Photo Library has introduced digital aerial photography on CD-ROM. By the simple process of importing a digital aerial photograph into a graphics program, planners, environmentalists and other geomatics professionals will be able to "zoom in" and conduct a detailed analysis of any site in Canada, or quickly add boundary lines, street names or other important information. Consultants will now have the ability to include digital imagery in reports by electronically pasting aerial photographs directly into documents.

Digital aerial photographs are available in Tagged Information File Format (TIFF), at resolutions of 300 and 600 dots per inch (dpi) for monochrome photography, and 600 dots per inch for colour photography. A full monochrome aerial photograph at 600 dpi is approximately 30MB in size, while a colour photograph is approximately 90MB. Please note only very limited geographic coverage is available in colour photography. Please contact us regarding the availability of digital images in other resolutions or formats.

Sample scanned air photo of Ottawa, showing Highway 417, Pretoria Bridge and the Rideau Canal

A sample monochrome scanned aerial photograph of a portion of the city of Saint John, New Brunswick is available here for download. The sample size is approximately 1.1MB. The data set was windowed from Air Photo A27818-9, taken at an altitude of 10 100 feet ASL on June 11, 1992. The data is in TIF format, as scanned from a 25cm X 25cm vertical aerial photographic contact print at a resolution of 600 dpi. The scale of the original photograph is 1/20 000.

Download sample data [ZIP, 1.1 Mb]

Please note this sample data is protected under the Copyright Act, and is for evaluation purposes only. Please do not redistribute the data.