Despite being Web-based—or likely because of it—the various USGS facilities for downloading digital images are painful and tedius to use. But a free mapping application makes it easier and quicker.

USAPhotoMaps, written by a retired airline pilot, lets you download images, one tile at a time, from Microsoft’s free TerraServer Web site, creating a seamless image database that you can pan and zoom with, switching between USGS quads, ancient grayscale aerial photos, and for some urban areas, brilliant high-resolution color aeral photos. Although you must install and use a separate command-line utility, you can also export any rectangular region as a JPEG image, along with a matching world file to enable georeferencing.

It may be possible to get a GeoTIFF directly from the USGS site, but it won’t be a pleasant experience.