1950's Birds Eye View

I've always really liked the oblique Bird's Eye view available on Bing Maps. I really love these 1950's bird's eye view photos of Glasgow, Scotland.

Glasgow Aerial Photos is a Leaflet map showing the location and the direction of the view of 159 historical aerial photographs of Glasgow. The photos were taken sometime in the 1950's or 1960's by the Glasgow Corporation Planning Department.

If you click on the link on any of the historical photographs another Leaflet map will open showing just the selected photo. You can then zoom in and pan around the photo to inspect it in greater detail.


Luckily Bing Maps has great Bird's Eye view imagery for Glasgow. So, with a bit of detective work, it is possible to discover the same views depicted in the Glasgow Planning Department photos as shown on Bing Maps and compare the two. The Bing Maps oblique view above shows almost the exact same view of Glasgow city center as the photo at the top of this post (click on the screenshot to visit the view in Bing Maps).

If you want to create your own Leaflet map using images or photos then you should have a look at Bjørn Sandvik's tutorial Showing Zoomify images with Leaflet. In the tutorial Bjørn explains how Zoomify can easily be used to create map tiles from any image. Using Zoomify and Leaflet it is therefore possible to turn any photo into a fully interactive digital map.