Historic England has launched its Aerial Photo Explorer tool, which uses SmartFrame’s image-streaming technology to showcase hundreds of thousands of previously unavailable aerial images
It is now possible to gain a truly unique view of how England’s landscape has evolved over the past 100 years thanks to Historic England’s brand-new Aerial Photo Explorer tool.
Accessible from the Historic England website, this new feature lets visitors use an interactive map to search, scroll, and zoom in to landmarks across the country. When a location is selected, it opens a SmartFrame containing one of over 400,000 available aerial images that span an entire century.
By making it possible to view evidence of medieval settlements, see famous industrial landmarks in their heyday, and marvel at modern-day architectural wonders, this tool provides a fascinating glimpse into England’s past and present, while documenting its continued transformation into the future.
The collection is being made available as part of the ongoing digitization of over six million aerial photographs preserved in the Historic England Archive. As such, it will be continually updated with new images from the collection.
Enhanced user experience
The Aerial Photo Explorer is a great example of how SmartFrames and their interactive features can be used by image owners and publishers to fantastic effect. The Hyper Zoom function enables viewers to zoom in to the finest details of each image, while full-screen viewing offers an even more immersive experience, all without affecting page loading times.
By enabling the Share function in the top right-hand corner of each image, Historic England has also made it possible for site visitors to legally share its images on social media and even embed them on their own websites for free.
The latter can be achieved by simply clicking the ‘Embed’ button, copying the code, and pasting it into the text editor on the back end of a website (be sure to read Historic England’s terms and conditions beforehand).
By doing this, you are streaming the image from its original source file rather than making a copy, much like embedding a YouTube video.
Learn more with our Embedding guide
Another great benefit of image-streaming is the ability to embed SmartFrame Captions at source – a feature put to good use here by Historic England. These captions ensure every image features a permanently attached credit that will follow it wherever it is streamed. Many also specify the landmark and location the image depicts, further improving the user experience.
Behind-the-scenes benefits
The benefits for the user are clear for all to see, but there are also huge advantages behind the scenes for Historic England. By using SmartFrame’s image-streaming technology, the organization is able to better secure its images against theft while maintaining complete control over their distribution.
This is achieved through right-click and screenshot protection, which helps prevent bad actors from making copies of Historic England’s image files, whether intentional or otherwise. The same security protects its photographs from image-scraping bots that can steal countless files in seconds.
In addition to this enhanced security, SmartFrame provides Historic England with detailed image analytics, which deliver valuable insights into how users are interacting with its content.
It is possible to see the number of impressions each SmartFrame has enjoyed, along with the amount of engagement it has received.
With all this security and control, Historic England can ensure its extensive archive of images is not only protected, but always used in context and for agreeable means.
Browse our website to learn more about how SmartFrame’s image-streaming technology is revolutionizing online image display for image owners, publishers and advertisers around the world.
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