GEOG 224 - The Canadian Landscape

Information on how to locate images on the Internet, plus direct links to Image Collections

Search Arca and discover treasures from BC's post-secondary & memory organisations. You'll find scholarly research materials and digital assets like newsletters, images, multimedia, and much more.

The Art Gallery of Ontario is dedicated to building a collection of photographs that reflects the artistic, historical, and social impact of the medium. With over 70,000 objects, the collection spans the history of photography from the 1840s to the present day.

British Columbia Historical Photographs Online contains annotated links to photograph databases and virtual galleries developed by our member institutions and hosted on various archival web sites throughout the province.

“To enhance Canadians’ knowledge, understanding and appreciation of events, experiences, people and objects that reflect and have shaped Canada’s history and identity, and also to enhance their awareness of world history and cultures.” (Canadian Museum of History Act)

With the help of our donors, we have created a series of Culture Trunks. These trunks are perfect for anyone wishing to learn more about the immigration history to Canada from a particular country or about their own cultural heritage.

The Canadian War Museum is Canada’s national museum of military history and one of the world’s most respected museums for the study and understanding of armed conflict. The Museum’s collections are among the finest military holdings in the world, including rare vehicles, artillery, uniforms, medals, personal memoirs and 14,000 works in the Beaverbrook Collection of War Art. In total, the collection comprises more than 3 million artifacts, specimens, works of art, written documents and sound and visual recordings. The Military History Research Centre houses the George Metcalf Archival Collection and the Hartland Molson Library. These extensive collections of primary and secondary research material document Canada’s rich military history.

The Chinese Canadian Artifacts Project (CCAP) for the first time brings together and makes accessible in a single, searchable database over 6000 Chinese Canadian artefacts held by 16 local and regional museums throughout British Columbia. Anyone with Internet access can virtually enter these participating museums and discover much about the everyday lives of early Chinese Canadians – their resilience in the face of over a century of racist exclusions, their work and family life from decades past, and their ongoing community contributions. Whether searching family genealogies, investigating Chinese Canadian history, or looking for Qing-era pottery, CCAP opens new pathways into the past and present.

Orthophotos are geometrically corrected aerial photographs that are often used as a visual background for maps and in mapping applications. New aerial photographs are taken at least once every two years to have a record of the changes that happen on the ground. The new orthophotos will have roads and buildings on them that did not exist yet when the last aerial photographs were taken.

Digital Museums Canada is the largest funding program in Canada dedicated to online projects by the museum and heritage community.

Search for orthorectified aerial photography of British Columbia. To view the ortho click View in Google Earth Button. The system will then download a Google Earth kml file to your computer. Click on the kml (usually located above your taskbar) the ortho in Google Earth.

Glenbow Library and Archives documents the human and natural history of Southern Alberta. Included in the digital collection are selections of photographs from the photographic archival collection.

Click on links in the left-hand Holdings Column to see artifacts.

The photographic collection is comprised of a variety of formats, including colour prints, black-and-white prints, negatives, glass plate negatives, daguerreotypes and tintypes.

Library and Archives Canada's (LAC) art and photography collections offer a visual history of Canada and Canadians, these search instructions are tailored specifically for researchers interested in finding images of Indigenous populations in Canada—First Nations, Métis and Inuit—the original inhabitants of North America.

The Mount Legacy Project is an interdisciplinary collaboration focused on exploring change in Canada's mountain environments. Utilizing over 140,000 images taken by land surveyors from 1861 - 1953, MLP researchers seek to re-photograph these images as accurately as possible and make the resulting image pairs available for further investigation.

From its earliest acquisitions by living Canadian painters in the 1880s, the Gallery has built a world-class collection spanning all periods of Canadian art, richly representing works by Europeans—from old masters to contemporary artists—and notable for strong holdings in photography.

This searchable resource features more than 800 photostories, created between 1955 and 1971 by the National Film Board of Canada (NFB). Combining text and photographs, each photographic essay presented a specific aspect of life in Canada. From mining to medicine, and religion to railroads, the NFB’s photostories were published across Canada and around the world, creating a unique portrait of Canada at a seminal time in its history.

Contains more than 1,000 scenic images of Canada taken by scientists of the Geological Survey of Canada over the last 30 years.

This map does not represent or intend to represent official or legal boundaries of any Indigenous nations. To learn about definitive boundaries, contact the nations in question. Also, this map is not perfect -- it is a work in progress with tons of contributions from the community. Please send us fixes if you find errors.

The NRCan Library manages a catalogue of more than 25,000 scanned images illustrating the activities of the Department. The database will continue to incorporate more images from the over 520,000 images that constitute the photo collection.

Nikkei National Museum & Cultural Centre's mission is to honour, preserve, and share Japanese culture and Japanese Canadian history and heritage for a better Canada. Located in Burnaby, BC, it offered unique programming, exhibits and events, as a community place open to all. Within the museum repository we care for 2600+ objects, 41,000+ photographs, 38 meters of textual records, 650 oral history recordings, and 156 film reels of historically and culturally significant items. With the addition of family and community stories every year, we ensure the legacies of people of Japanese ancestry in Canada live on into the future.

Challenging the notion that Nikkei individuals before and during World War II were helpless pawns manipulated by forces beyond their control, the diverse essays in this rich collection focus on the theme of resistance within Japanese American and Japanese Canadian communities to twentieth-century political, cultural, and legal discrimination. They illustrate how Nikkei groups were mobilized to fight discrimination through assertive legal challenges, community participation, skillful print publicity, and political and economic organization.Comprised of all-new and original research, this is the first anthology to highlight the contributions and histories of Nikkei within the entire Pacific Northwest, including British Columbia.

Canada's Orthoimages 2005-2010 is the national medium-resolution imagery coverage of Canada. These digital raster data acquired by the Spot4 and Spot5 satellites comprise five spectral bands, namely: a panchromatic band having 10 m pixels and four multispectral bands having pixels of 20 m. These orthoimages were produced according to the 1983 North American Reference System (NAD83SCRS) according to the Universal Transverse Mercator (UTM) and Lambert Conformal Conic (LCC) mapping.

Most of the photos displayed here illustrate mainly Sikh immigration owing to the fact that early settlement from Punjab was predominantly Sikh. In the early part of this century all immigrants from India were indiscriminately called "hindoo" or "hindu" regardless of religious affiliation. The term "hindoo" was also sometimes used in a pejorative sense for anyone from that continent.

Use this database to find descriptions and select digitized versions of archival records held at the BC Archives. You can use “quotes” for an exact phrase, the asterisk* as a wild card, and the advanced search function to narrow your results.

The Royal BC Museum’s Indigenous collection has more than 14,000 cultural objects from First Nations communities throughout the province; these cultural objects were collected from the early 19th century to present day. The collection ranges from large poles and canoes to small items of jewellery and adornment. It is one of the most comprehensive collections of Indigenous cultural materials from BC. The collection also includes approximately 65,000 images documenting Indigenous communities and ways of life over more than a century, from the 1850s when the first photographs were taken in British Columbia to present day.

With thousands of items currently logged in its database, ROM's Online Collections is an ongoing project to digitally archive the Museum's physical collections and make them accessible for all. We are adding new objects all the time with the goal of having 100,000 ROM objects available in this database. You can search for specific objects by name, browse galleries by category or geography, make personal collections or view others'.

The Museum’s encyclopaedic collections and world-leading research helps visitors gain a better understanding of the world around us. The Museum’s programming uses our rich curatorial content and intellectual strength as the organizing principle. Each element of our public offering embraces the ROM’s collections and exhibitions—from contemporary art to world cultures and natural history—creating a consistent framework within which visitors can better understand the scope of the Museum.

When the first photographic process, the daguerreotype, was introduced worldwide in 1839, it became known as “the mirror with a memory” — and until the invention of digital cameras and modern editing techniques in the late 20th century, photos were widely considered to be objective visual records.

Following the declaration of war on Japan, Japanese nationals and Canadian citizens of Japanese descent were forcibly removed from what was considered to be strategic, restricted coastal areas of British Columbia in 1942. Evacuees were first dispatched to temporary facilities at Vancouver's Hastings Park and then from there relocated to areas in the B.C. interior and beyond. Families were often separated with many men being sent to road camps. Numerous road camps were constructed to support three principle road construction projects including the Yellowhead-Blue River Highway, Hope-Princeton Highway and Revelstoke-Sicamous Highway. Women, children and the elderly were generally dispatched to internment camps in purpose-built or revived towns in the B.C. interior. Major camps included, Tashme, Lemon Creek, Greenwood, Sandon, New Denver, Slocan, Roseberry, Kaslo, and Bay Farm.

UBC Library's Open Collections include digital photos, books, newspapers, maps, videos, theses and more. These publicly-accessible collections are constantly growing and reflect the research interests of the UBC community and beyond. include the ability to download content.

With a photography studio in the heart of Vancouver’s Chinatown, between 1906-1949 Yucho Chow captured a unique aspect of this remarkable neighbourhood’s history. He photographed during a tumultuous and transformative period: Through two world wars; the Spanish Flu; and the Great Depression. Chow’s studio survived despite escalating racial tensions and laws that targeted Chinese and other non-white immigrants. Although he was Chinese, Yucho Chow was one of the few commerical photographers willing to take photos of non-white customers. He chronicled the lives and special moments for early Sikh and Hindu immigrants; Black residents; mixed-raced families; Indigenous families; and newly-arrived European immigrants from countries like Poland, Croatia, Ukraine, Italy, Germany, Sweden to name a few.