The San Francisco Office of Assessor-Recorder Photographs includes over 94,000 photographs and 75,000 frames of negatives of properties photographed by the San Francisco Office of Assessor-Recorder from the late 1940s through the early 2000s. The Office of the Assessor-Recorder transferred the strips of negatives to the San Francisco History Center in the early 1980s and the photographs in 2019.
In order to locate the photographs and negatives on file for a property, you might need to do two searches – one by address/Assessor Parcel Number (APN) and one by block number.
***To note before your visit to the Photo Desk, these bundles are unavailable August - December 2, 2024. The photographs in the bundles are at a vendor for a digitization project.
Address/APN:
Use the map below or the Address/APN Index to determine if there is a photograph and/or negative on file for the property. If the address has a box number and bundle identifier, please make a note of it. To view the photograph(s), please visit the San Francisco History Center during the open hours of the Photo Desk, and we will pull it for you.
There are more collections to explore for finding a photograph of a building.
Block Number Search:
To be thorough with your research, search by block number also. Sometimes when a property does not show up in an Address search, you can find it in a Block Number search.
If you don’t know your block number, find it on the San Francisco Property Information Map. Then check this guide to see if the library has it: List of negatives arranged numerically by block number (PDF)
The photographs and negatives may be viewed during the Photo Desk open hours.
In addition, over 800 negatives from the San Francisco Office of Assessor-Recorder Photographs have been scanned and added to the San Francisco Digital Collections.