I have been a regular user of Bing Maps oblique aerial photo feature, which they call “Bird’s Eye”. Went on today to look at a location and it says they have “updated” the feature and it is no longer available except in certain metropolitan areas. None of my area has the feature anymore. Does anyone know of an alternative source to see similar oblique aerial photos?
Not familiar with that particular function of Bing however Google Maps or Google Earth has been the common way to view such images for a few years.
Did you right click where you wanted to see? Bird’s eye is no longer on the pull down menu to the right, but right clicking brings up the option if it is available. Works well in my area.
But I’m still pissed and am looking for a good email address to write to them. I hope they can somehow keep the older bird’s eye view around. It was last updated in 2005 in my area and that is exactly what I want.
I’m a historian and frequently need to identify the location of aerial photos taken in the 1960s. The Bing view was very helpful, since it was at least a look back in time 12 years. Many things have been torn down since then.
Plus, all the original bird’s eye view photos were taken in fall, and the lack of foliage was a huge help in rural areas compared to Google. The new bird’s eye photos are taken in summer.
If you are in a rural area, look at http://vintageaerial.com/ and see if your location is listed. When you get to your county you can search by location, or click on “Browsing our entire archive” to see all the rolls of films and index maps.
But there is no other source of oblique views I have ever found. I still don’t know how they did it, a marvelously integrated series of photos and you could spin around over the location and view it from all 4 sides.
Dennis
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Did you right click where you wanted to see? Bird’s eye is no longer on the pull down menu to the right, but right clicking brings up the option if it is available. Works well in my area.
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Yeah, I right clicked in several areas in three states and it is available in only one area I looked at. I will check out the website you mentioned tomorrow.
I used this feature several times a week and am disappointed they have so severely restricted it.
Maybe I’m not understanding what you mean by this, but Google maps provides an oblique view feature. Click on Satellite in the lower left, then click on 3D in the lower right. Click on the compass icon to rotate the view. Also, Google Earth is pretty awesome in VR if you have a VR system.
The Google (Maps and Earth) tilted view is far inferior to Bing’s Bird’s Eye. It is more artificial and less detailed and isn’t very useful, IMO.
Google, as far as I know, made it impossible to get to their oblique images on their own platforms a while ago (replacing it with “3D” fake crap) but the images still exist. I use KMLMap to get to them. They show up in satellite mode if you zoom in far enough. I don’t know what the coverage is, though.
Agree 100%. And very sad and annoyed to see that Bing’s Bird’s Eye is no longer available in our area. :(:mad:
I remember being fascinated with it 10+ years ago when I discovered it.
Perhaps the quality varies in different areas. Looking at downtown San Francisco in Google 3D view seems quite detailed and realistic to me. I can read the posters hanging on the front of the War Memorial Opera House, peek in the windows of SFMOMA and practically see the rivets in the crane next to the building.
While this is true, Bing had a far more superior view with their “Birds Eye” view. It wasn’t a mere top down view that you could zoom decently close to, it was 4 angles that you could switch to in order to view the area you wanted to see. No other mapping service to date has had such a great feature.
Google Maps is always my go to for most things, but Bing’s Birds Eye view was amazing.
Old thread I know, but that’s still OK, right?
I came across this thread while searching for any discussions about how bad Bird’s-Eye View has gotten.
Even for the cities where it still exists, the view has gone from about 45 degrees to what now looks like around 70 or even steeper. So no longer do we have that great perspective that was much like looking out of an airplane window; instead it’s now almost the same as the basic overhead view. If the buildings are aligned along the four main points on the compass, then they look rather like how a child would draw the view from a plane, all very flat and no depth.
I just needed to vent. I was trying to see how much my arbor vitae trees have grown by comparing different Bird’s-Eye dates, but that’s basically impossible now.
I thought Bing’s bird’s eye view went away a long time ago, and I wasn’t happy about it because it was much more useful than what we have now. These are (were) actual aerial photos taken at an angle. Since they were usually taken in fall/winter you could look through trees and foliage, though apparently that’s not a guarantee anymore. While Google’s 3D view is constructed from angled photographs, it applies those photos to a 3D mesh generated by the photography and perhaps some LIDAR or other scanning. So you can only view the photos as mapped onto the interpolated 3D shapes. That means trees, power lines, harsh shadows, and overhanging roofs mangle the geometry. It’s low-resolution enough that chimneys get turned into points, and detail that would otherwise be readable in the originating photograph is destroyed.
Ugh that looks awful! It’s like a weird SimCity orthographic projection, presumably to allow for better scrolling/panning. Before you simply panned around each individual photo as it came out of the camera, and it would fade/swap to the next one if you panned too far over. I didn’t really mind that.
Here’s a comparison between the two. Even with the new steep Bing view it’s still more comprehensible than Google.
They didn’t take it all away; they took away only the rural/wilderness areas leaving only cities. From what I’ve seen it does include cities at least down to 100K or so of population, so there’s that. But I used to love looking for odd locations in the California desert, like Mecca Hills above the Salton Sea. And it’s not like those areas need a lot of updating. It’s such a shame they did away with it.
Just over a month ago, Google rolled out a new version of Earth that everyone hates. Among the other problems, if you have the photos layer activated, it no longer supports zoom when you look at the images. In other words, it’s essentially pointless on a phone.