Overview of photometric galaxy cluster surveys at optical wavelengths

Abstract The first galaxy cluster catalog was constructed by Abell in the 50s. Since then, with the advent of multi-megapixel digital cameras mounted on telescopes all over the world there have been a variety of optical photometric surveys with the ambituous goal to map out the large scale structure of the universe to larger and larger redshifts. One goal of these large scale structure surveys has been the discovery of thousands of galaxy clusters which have been used for a variety of cosmological and astrophysical studies. We shall review the salient features of these galaxy cluster surveys in the past two decades and provide a brief snapshot of some of the upcoming surveys in the next decade.