How to find old photographs of your house
Tax photos, library and historical-society collections, newspaper morgues, real-estate listings, aerial surveys, and Google Street View's own archive — a practical guide to finding a picture of your house as it used to be, and the honest odds for each source.
By The Plot Team · May 23, 2026 · 4 min read
Of all the questions house historians ask, this is the one people feel the most: what did my house look like before? A document tells you who owned it; a photograph lets you stand in front of it in another decade. Pictures are harder to find than records — most houses were never photographed deliberately — but more survive than you'd think. Here's where to look, roughly in order of likelihood.
The jackpot: municipal tax photos
A handful of cities photographed every building for tax purposes, and those collections are the single best source of an ordinary house's portrait. New York City is the gold standard — it photographed every building around 1939–1941 and again in the mid-1980s, both now free through the Municipal Archives. Some other cities ran similar surveys at various dates. If your city did, this is the first place to look: it's the rare source that has a picture of your house specifically, not just your block.
Libraries and historical societies
Most cities have a local-history library collection or a historical society with a digitized photograph archive — street scenes, neighborhood surveys, donated family albums. The big ones (the Denver Public Library's Western History collection, the Boston Public Library, the Los Angeles Public Library's photo collections, the City of Vancouver Archives, and hundreds of smaller societies) are searchable online and free. Search by street name, by neighborhood, and by nearby landmark — your house may be in the background of a photo taken of the corner store or the streetcar line.
Newspaper photo morgues
Newspapers kept "morgues" — clipping and photo files organized by subject and place — and many have been digitized. The Washington Star morgue (at DC Public Library), the Atlanta Journal-Constitution archive (Georgia State), and similar collections elsewhere hold street and building photos that never ran in print. Search the morgue by neighborhood and street. Separately, historical newspaper text (Chronicling America, Trove, Papers Past) sometimes printed building photos with real-estate notices — worth a phrase search for your address.
Real-estate listings and the recent past
For the last 20–30 years, the easiest "old" photos are real-estate listing photos. If your house ever sold online, the listing images may survive in real-estate-site history, Google image results, or the Internet Archive's Wayback Machine (search the old listing URL). This won't reach the deep past, but it documents recent appearance and renovations — useful for establishing what changed and when.
Aerial surveys: the top-down view
If you can't find a street-level photo, you can almost always find your house from above. The federal and state governments flew aerial photography surveys for decades; many states host historic aerials online (and the USGS EarthExplorer and university libraries carry runs back to the 1930s–40s for much of the country). An aerial won't show the façade, but it shows the footprint, the outbuildings, the trees, and the surrounding land — and dated side by side, the aerials reveal exactly when a garage went up or a neighboring lot was built on.
Street View has a time machine
Don't overlook the obvious recent source: Google Street View keeps its past captures. Open Street View at your address and look for the clock / "see more dates" control — you can often step back to the late 2000s and watch the house change across a decade and a half of drive-bys. It's the easiest "before" picture most houses have.
The honest odds
A clear word on expectations. Most ordinary houses were never individually photographed before the digital era — the families who lived there took snapshots, but those are in private albums, not archives. The realistic finds are: a tax photo (if your city ran a survey), a background appearance in a street or neighborhood photo, an aerial, and the recent listing/Street View record. A deliberate portrait of a non-notable house from the 1900s–1950s is a lucky find, not a given. When you do find one, save the source citation — where it came from, the collection, the date — so the picture stays anchored to its provenance.
How Plot gathers imagery
Plot pulls free-licensed imagery for an address automatically — from Wikimedia Commons and the cross-referenced public record — and, in New York City, surfaces the 1940s and 1980s tax photos that show a building directly. It's honest that a guaranteed portrait of every house doesn't exist in any database; what Plot does is gather what is freely available and assemble it alongside the written history, so you start from everything the open record holds and know exactly which local archive to try next.