The aerial photo lookup assists users in the research of hard-copy historical aerial photos. These are not orthophotos. See Orthophoto Imagery for information on digital ortho-photography and availability of online orthophotos.
The aerial photo database only contains information pertaining to photo flight years between 1946 and 2003.
You can look up aerial photos two ways:
Use this map to find and zoom into a section. Then click that section to open a section square and then pick the "More info" link in the popup. This will opens a list of aerial photos that include some or all of that section's area.
Search for a list of aerial photos by choosing township, range and section numbers, unique ID, or other criteria.
Aerial Photos are now coming online in PDF format for viewing and printing. If the image has been scanned and available there will be a link that says "Photo", click on the hyperlink to display the image. Otherwise it will say "Not scanned" or not available yet.