The map above summarizes the coverage of aerial photographs available from the National Archives as part of the records of the Defense Intelligence Agency (Record Group 373, in archive parlance). Most of the photos were collected as part of an effort to create air transportation maps during the WWII era.

There are 24,000,000 photos in this one part of the RG 373 archive, two-thirds of which are oblique, leaving about 8,000,000 vertical photos. Some of the blank areas in the map may have no photos in them, however we assume that most are of these areas are due to the lack of a complete catalog of the photos (roughly half of the archived film cans haven’t been matched to associated index sheets).

Methods for the creation of the map can be found here.

UPDATE: Peter Becker (Product Manager for imagery at ESRI) has posted a higher resolution version of the map as a web service @ http://arcg.is/nyKLW 

The full resolution version of the map can be downloaded here  (tif file, 566 Mb)

A 1/4 resolution version of the map can be downloaded here  (tif file, 41 Mb)

The 1/4 resolution version is also available as aKMZ version (kmz file)

What follows are higher resolution images of selected subsets:

Images by hemisphere: Northwest , Southwest, Northeast, Southeast