City Atlas

Philly 1860-2025

2025

Aerial Photography - 3-inch

Modern Aerial

Coverage for this survey year is incomplete.

How to read this

What This Map Is Showing

One fixed camera. Many basemaps. The timeline swaps between hand-drawn atlases, land-use surveys, and modern aerial imagery so you can watch Philadelphia change in place.

Resolution

1-inch / 2-inch / 3-inch / 6-inch means ground resolution per pixel.
1-inch is sharper than 6-inch because each pixel covers less area on the ground.
These are map-imagery resolution labels, not print sizes.

What The Years Represent

1860–1910: hand-drawn city atlases.
1928–1975: early aerial and land-use survey layers.
1996–2025: modern aerial orthophotography.

Acknowledgements

Imagery and historical map layers come from the City of Philadelphia GIS imagery archive and related public map services.
Open data context and dataset discovery in this repo are supported by OpenDataPhilly.
Built with philly, aided by the tool’s data exploration capabilities.

GitHub Repo OpenDataPhilly

Use left/right to step, space to play, and home/end to jump.