Aerial photography generally means the ordinary acquisition of photos from the air, without any specialised techniques. The photos may be either vertical or oblique, and are commonly used for advertising, real estate, and so on.
Aerial surveying, on the other hand, covers a large number of techniques where information (in a broad sense) is being collected from the air. This information can consist of imagery in the human visual range, as well as other bands such as Near Infrared (NIR).
Another technique within the category of aerial surveying is Aerial Photogrammetry, in which accurate geometric measurements are made by advanced 3D processing of overlapping images recorded from different vantage points. This allows the generation of Orthophotos (map-like images that are free of perspective distortion), and 3D terrain data.
A key feature of aerial surveying is that location data is embedded in the files containing the imagery. For example, we supply file types such as ECW, GeoTIFF and Google Earth KMZ. When viewing the data in suitable viewer, the user can instantly read the coordinates of any point in the imagery, and even its elevation depending on the file type.