There are a lot of really nice photographs of aircraft one can find on the Internet. Not only do people create galleries of photographs, but you can find pictures by “following” individuals on Instagram, Twitter and Facebook, or by joining specific Facebook groups.
What irritates me – and I am saying this because I tend to look at photographs as a form of historical record – is the lack of information about what all these photographs depict. I started So Many Aircraft as a means of providing and distributing reference information about aircraft, based on my own interest on building scale models. Collecting reference material for a model project often involves attempts to understand where and when a particular aircraft was used, and correlating multiple photographs found from different sources (as a model of an aircraft is like a snapshot of history). Against this, finding a (nice) photograph of, say, a Boeing 737 labeled “737 taking off from runway 17” is frustrating: Exactly what variant of 737 is this (I can see that it is a 737, but is it a -300, -7H4, or what?), what specific aircraft is this (what is its tail number and/or construction number?), where was this picture taken (runway 17 where?) and when?
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