How to: Find Pictures of my House
One of the most popular questions at The City Archives & Special Collections is how to find pictures of houses. The first place that we recommend checking is with the previous homeowner. Remember that houses can be backgrounds in family photos, so you might get lucky while scouring through them. Also check with neighbors who have lived in the area for a while, they might have a few pictures that include your house.
This post provides a few additional suggestions for locating pictures of your house in the City Archives & Special Collections. Suggestions are made based on property location.
If you live anywhere in the city…
…The Streets Photograph Collection contains house exteriors with addresses or blocks noted. However, many of the photographs are of the streets rather than buildings, so the house imagery is often more incidental than the focus of the photograph. Most of these photos are from the 1950s, but they extend from 1926-1985.
These photographs were taken by a variety of city agencies and encompass a broad mix of neighborhoods and focal points.
Researcher Hint: Be creative, and search across multiple collections. All of our digitized images are available on ContentDM, and you can search all collections simultaneously. Some collections offer complete surveys of an area, while most offer small snippets of a neighborhood. A search for a street name may yield more results than a specific address.
If you live in an Historic District…
…Try the Historic Districts Landmark Commission. The HDLC took photographic surveys of houses between 1979 and 2004. There are a few photographs available, identified by address, but must be viewed in person. Additionally, there are 50,000 slides available for in-person viewing. A sample collection of the slides are digitized for remote viewing.
Not sure whether or not you live in an Historic District? The neighborhoods included in the survey are displayed in this map, as are the addresses represented in the slides.
The Koch and Wilson Photograph Collection is also part of the Historic Districts Landmark Commission Collection and includes almost 300 photographs taken in 1979 of historic buildings.
If you live in the Vieux Carré…
…Try the Collins C. Diboll Vieux Carré Digital Survey. This resource was not created by City Archives, but it is a helpful resource when it comes to images, maps, and property history in the French Quarter. It also contains digital copies of some items that are in our collections.
If you live in the Bywater…
…Try the Marc J. Cooper Photograph Collection for photographs of buildings in the Bywater taken between 1978 and 1994.
If you live in Gentilly Woods…
…Try the Gentilly Woods Plan Book for housing models available to potential buyers when the neighborhood was being built up in the 1950s. The book offers drawings of houses rather than photographs, but may help to answer questions about design choices made over time.
Researcher Hint: Be sure to pay attention to changes in street names and numbering systems over time. Our records are associated with street names and numbers as they were when the photographs were taken and maps drawn; many have changed over time.
If you are looking for more…
…Try maps and surveys of your neighborhood. Fire Insurance Maps show the footprints of buildings with dimensions and details about what they were made out of such as timber or masonry frame. Although these maps were created with the intention of calculating insurance costs, they remain valuable for researchers looking to learn more about the history of their houses. Click the image of the map to learn more about how to use Sanborn Fire Insurance Maps for research.
Also check out our page on the Property Guide with links to Maps, Surveys, and Photographs; that page is updated as new sources are processed and added to our collection.
City Archives & Special Collections also holds a collection of Building Plans and Blueprints.
The majority of our Building Plans represent commercial or governmental buildings, but there are a limited number of residential plans in the collection as well.
If you want to look a little deeper…
…Check the local newspapers for descriptions of houses for sale or rent. Older sale notices would sometimes describe features of the buildings such as number of bedrooms and fireplaces or type of exterior facade.
Similarly, a rental notice in the paper might imply that house which is now a single family house was previously a multi-family unit, or it could list a number of bedrooms available to let.
Finally, take a look around your neighborhood. Do many of the houses look similar? Many New Orleans neighborhoods were built up as subdivisions, with similar architectural features applied to most of the houses in the area. Compare your house to some of the well-preserved houses in your block to see if you can guess what renovations may have altered your house over time.
Beyond our Collections…
…Google Maps Street View shows exterior photographs of properties taken over time by Google. They go back to about 2007. Some years there are no images, and some years there are multiple images.
To access older images, open the address in Google Street View using a desktop browser. Select the “See more dates” option, then choose the image that you would like to view.
Request Images
More Resources
Check out our Property Research Guide to learn more about all of the resources we have collected to assist with property research.
This post was created in 2025 by Amy DeNisco.