First released in 2011, the Wisconsin Historic Aerial Imagery Finder (“WHAIFinder”) has been our primary means of providing download access to over 38,000 scanned aerial photographs acquired between 1936 and 1941. We recently reached a major new milestone: we now have nearly 150,000 photos available for free download, dating from 1936 to 2022. In addition to acquiring and organizing new scanned photography, we completely redesigned the WHAIFinder Web app from the ground-up. We also now maintain an Esri feature service that GIS users can utilize for searching and then downloading GeoTIFF-format images, and a “bulk download” option for grabbing large volumes of data for specific areas of interest. In this presentation I will talk about what is available and lessons learned along the way.
