A simple web app for comparing historical aerial imagery (i.e. air photos) in the City of Toronto. Built for teaching and research purposes at the School of Cities, but made openly available for anyone interested in Toronto history.
https://schoolofcities.github.io/historical-aerial-imagery-toronto/
Imagery for 1947 comes from the University of Toronto's Map and Data Library. We additionally processed these by clipping and combining them into a single raster tile package.
Imagery for 1985 comes from the City of Toronto Archives. We additionally processed these images by clipping and geo-referencing them, and then combing them into a single raster tile package.
Images for all other years are sourced from the City of Toronto. These are shared as WMTS (Web Map Tiled Services). Note that for 1939 we blacked-out a significant portion of the imagery that was not geo-referenced properly.
Labels on the maps are derived from the City of Toronto's Centerline data.
git clone https://github.com/schoolofcities/historical-aerial-imagery-toronto
cd historical-aerial-imagery-toronto
npm install
npm run dev