In Google Streetview there is a menu item that allows the user to select different dates, based on the various images captures over the years since its inception. Is there a similar function for the aerial/satellite imagery?
@mixdenny is the resident Doper expert on all things about online archival maps & images. I don’t know but I bet he does.
@enipla is a professional GIS guy and might also have some useful input. Although he’s more on the creation end than the consumption end for this stuff.
I’ve tried and failed to find a similar function.
Google Earth, which requires downloading a program, does have time-lapse satellite imagery.
I’ve also used NearMaps, which appears to be a collection of time-lapse aerial imagery in certain Western cities - which is what I needed it for. It’s a paid service though.
there is not a timeline function that I know of on Google Maps. Bing maps used to be time travel of sorts. They stopped photographing around 2014 I think. So if you used the birdseye view function the photos were older. They also photographed most of the images in the fall and winter so you could make out things much clearer with no trees in the way. I really miss BIng.
Now you can go to Historic Aerials which goes back to the early 1950s in most places. But you cannot zoom in very far.
This may be true for the Bird’s Eye view images, but the Aerial images on Bing have been updated more recently. I just looked for a feature that was built in 2018 and it’s there. I use Bing through a third party which has somewhat different interface than the standard Bing; it only has Aerial View, not Bird’s Eye view. So I went to Bing directly and found the same feature in the Aerial view but not in the Bird’s Eye view. That is an older image.
Now for quite a while, the Sidestreet (Bing’s version of Streetview) images seemed to be last updated about 2015, but that’s changed and there are more recent images there. It tells you when they were taken, but unlike Streetview, there’s no way to go back to earlier images.
I’m not understanding this. Bing is still online.
Yes, when Bing restarted up it started taking images again.
I miss Bing because of the time-lagged BIrdseye view which I used a lot to identify rural buildings. There are a hell of a lot of buildings gone since 2010 or whatever. It’s a case of a problem (images frozen from years ago) being a feature for me.
I even contacted Bing and explained what they had- a tremendous historical archive that was already indexed and readily accessible. I wondered if it was possible to save it somehow. No one got back to me.