Bermuda Aerial Photos 1940 & 1973

1940	1973	2010

Happy New Year (almost)!

Thanks to the Bermuda Government Survey Section and the National Museum of Bermuda, I've been able to obtain and put online high-resolution aerial photographs of Bermuda from 1940 and 1973. I've converted them into Google Maps KML tiles format which allows you to use a standard web browser to pan and zoom into the highest level of detail. In some cases this is under 1 meter (more detail than the Google satellite photos, for example). These photos, in combination with today's satellite imagery, are a valuable tool for seeing how Bermuda has developed over the past 70 years. All you have to do is count the numer of white roofs, and the amount of open space available.

These aerial photos and metadata are made available courtesy of the survey section, and are copyright the Bermuda Government. The photos and data may not be reproduced, etc. without their prior permission.

Access the photos here:

• 1940 Aerial Photos
• 1973 Aerial Photos

The page allows you to fade between the historical view and the current Google Earth satellite view using a slider in the top right-hand corner — to view just the historical aerial photo move the slider all the way to the right, like so:

For the technically curious, the original data was in MrSid format, I used MapTiler to convert the data, and the converted data is made available via Amazon S3. The converted data uses about 8 gigabytes of space (1 gigabyte for the 1940 data and 7 gigabytes for the 1973 data), and was converted and uploaded over the course of a few weeks using a great deal of patience.

Visit my website decouto.bm for more Bermuda data and my library of Bermuda documents.