Historical OPM of Prague 1945

Czech archives keep only photographs of the territory of the Czech Republic taken in the 1930s and then in the first half of the 1950s. However, we can fill this gap with photographs taken in the period of World War II.

At the end of 2015 we were commissioned by IPR Prague to make an orthophotomap of Prague from archival aerial reconnaissance photographs taken by the Allies in the spring of 1945. Working together with Luftbilddatenbank Dr. Carls GmbH, we covered practically the entire territory of Prague using archival aerial photographs dating from spring 1945. We had access to a total of 1082 images from 10 reconnaissance missions. The images were mostly taken during April and May 1945, and the scale ranged from 1 : 7 000 to 1 : 50 000. For the resulting orthophotomap we only used the small-scale images for places where no better data were available.

We referenced the scanned aerial images in ArcGIS. After referencing all the images, the next step was the conventional creation of a digital orthophotomap. The orthophotomap, with a pixel size of 25 cm, covers 98.4 % of the total area of the City of Prague.

The resulting product is publicly accessible on the City of Prague Geoportal in the Orthophotoarchive application, as well as in the Dvě Prahy (Two Pragues) application, enabling a single area to be compared at two different periods of time.

On 14th February 2017, IPR Prague published the so-called Story Map, where you can see not only an aerial view of war Prague, but the application is also accompanied by comments on individual damaged objects and photos from the archives of IPR Prague. The application called "Airstrikes on Prague 1944-1945" is available at the following link: http://iprpraha.maps.arcgis.com/apps/MapJournal/index.html?appid=7b7eccf7075f4d23bf62b6b1d689aa3c.