How to find photos of aircraft you've flown

What you need

• The registration, painted on the side of the aircraft and written in most logbooks. It is how photo sites file their photos.
• The date you flew.
• The departure and arrival airports. A photo only shows your flight if it was taken at one of them.
• Your times, if you have them. They help when the aircraft visited the same airport more than once that day.

The manual method, step by step

1. Find the registration in your logbook. Type it exactly as painted, hyphen included: G-EUYR, not GEUYR. Photo sites often find nothing for a registration typed without its hyphen. US registrations, such as N172SP, have no hyphen.
2. Search for it on a photo site. Planespotters.net, JetPhotos and Airliners.net each list the photos they hold for a registration. Where to find aircraft photos online explains how to search each one.
3. Look for your date. Use the date the photo was taken, not the date it was uploaded. Photos often go online weeks or months after they were taken.
4. Check the airport. It has to be your departure or arrival airport. The same aircraft photographed somewhere else that day was on a different flight.
5. Check it was your visit. An airliner can land at the same airport two or three times in a day. If the photo shows a time, compare it with yours.
6. Repeat on the next site. Each site has its own photographers, so a photo missing from one can turn up on another.

How long it takes

We timed it. Checking one site for ten days of flying, each day out and back in the same aircraft, took about five minutes. At that pace a logbook of 1,000 flights takes about four hours on one site, and about 21 hours across the five sites we search. Changing aircraft during the day makes it slower, because each aircraft is a search of its own.

Expect most searches to find nothing. Of the 7,651 flights on Flown and Found in October 2026, 2% had a photo from the day.

The easier way

Upload your logbook as a ForeFlight CSV export or an Excel file and we do the searching for you, for every flight in it. For each aircraft we look for photos taken at your departure or arrival airport on the day you flew, worked out in that airport’s local time.

We keep looking, too. Photographers keep posting for months, so we look again 4, 10, 17 and 26 weeks after each flight, then at 9 months, a year and two years. Every photo we find shows the photographer’s name and links to their own page.

Import your logbook explains what to upload.

Who this works well for

Whether you search by hand or let us do it, you can only find photos somebody took and posted. Some flying is photographed far more than the rest.

Works well

• Airline and larger commercial flying.
• Busy airports, especially ones with places for spotters to stand.
• Flights in daylight.

Weaker

• Light aircraft and general aviation. They are photographed far less often than airliners, so expect few photos from the day. Photos of the aircraft itself are more common.
• Military flying. Far fewer military flights are photographed and posted, so expect very few matches.
• Small airports and airfields. Fewer people photograph aircraft there.
• Night flights. Very few photos are taken in the dark.
• Recent flights. Photos keep arriving long after the day. Of the same-day JetPhotos photos we have matched to flights, 58% were online four weeks after the flight and 92% after six months.