News & Articles

Find out about the latest news from NCAP and discover in-depth stories about NCAP collections, activities and projects.

A historic black and white vertical aerial photo of about a dozen ships pulled up on a beach. The land beyond the beach has been divided up into a grid, and the scene is slightly obscured by clouds or smoke.

Image Release Note 0001: Initial Upload

The Initial Batch Release unveils over 216,000 aerial images that span military reconnaissance and decades of survey work the globe.

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A dark room lit with green lights. In the foreground are two stacks of photographic prints. Above them, a red robotic arm is visible, blurred with movement. In the background, a person with their back to us looks at a bright white screen.

NCAP at 100: Preserving the Past, Shaping the Future

As NCAP’s vast aerial imagery collections approach their centennial this month, we celebrate our legacy while focusing on an exciting future. Our mission: ensuring that these invaluable historic aerial photographs...

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A man and a woman sitting at a desk. The man is wearing a grey jumper. The woman has red hair and is wearing a blue shirt. There is a computer, keyboard and two screens on the desk. The woman is showing the man something on one of the screens.

Transforming our Online Platforms

As the National Collection of Aerial Photography (NCAP) marks its centennial, we are thrilled to announce the launch of our revamped website and image discovery portal.

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A black and white aerial photo of a landscape. Woods fill the left-hand third of the image, there are mostly fields to the right and a road cuts across the top half. Scattered across the fields are over 60 gliders. Smoke blows from right to left.

Operation Market Garden at 80: The Battle

Immortalised in the epic film A Bridge Too Far and recorded in the NCAP Collection, Operation Market Garden might have brought about the end of the Second World War in 1944.

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A black and white oblique aerial photo of a river. A network of steel girders fills the bottom third of the image. Boats are visible beyond the bridge. In the distance are industrial buildings on the left riverbank and a second bridge with 3 spans.

Operation Market Garden at 80: Reconnaissance

On the 80th anniversary of the start of the famous Operation Market Garden, we explore how aerial photographs now in the NCAP Collection played a vital role in its planning...

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The logo of the National Collection of Aerial Photography.

New Website Launch

NCAP is thrilled to announce the launch of its revamped website. 

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A historic black and white vertical aerial photo of about a dozen ships pulled up on a beach. The land beyond the beach has been divided up into a grid, and the scene is slightly obscured by clouds or smoke.

Commemorating D-Day: A Historical Perspective from Above

On the 80th anniversary of one of the most important days of the twentieth century, we look at the images in the NCAP Collection which mark this defining moment.

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A red robot arm carefully lifts a historic photographic print onto a glass scanner bed. The background is out of focus, but other robot arms and scanners are just visible. To the left, a person sits at a computer screen with their back to the camera.

Pioneering Robotic Digitisation

Read about how we are using groundbreaking technology and techniques to digitise millions of the images in the NCAP Collection.

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