Google Earth

I commented in another forum that I often find myself going to BING because of poor image quality on GOOGLE EARTH. Someone there suggested that they have set the zoom levels wrong in historical images but even the latest ones are often not very useful now.

I think the extra padding from the 1980s onward are true satellite images as opposed to the aerial photos used in more recent decades. The latter of often referred to as satellite images but rarely are.

GE seems to have added these (satt photos) a few months ago but were only visible in the timeline when zoomed out to a rough county view. They are now appearing, annoyingly at closer zooms, making selection of specific years problematic. As I write this I do notice that some areas do have more recent (2016?) satellite coverage as the photos are very poor quality and often covered with a lot of cloud and the shadows from them. However they are much better than the 1980/90 offering.

Annoying they may be but the old satt photos do show or track major changes from that period, new roads,rail, shopping centres and runway extension/removal etc. If the dates can be relied upon it give a definite timeline.

I recall the first article I did for Airfield Review on modern aerial photograph coverage included a number of sites that included these early satt photos and in the pre-Millennium Map (Getmapping from 1999) era it was sometimes the glimpse I had of an airfield from the air (that wasn't in a book). I therefore view them with a bit of nostalgia harking back to the early days of the internet when finding such things was exciting (apart from those popups that you couldn't stop!)

mbriscoe wrote:

I commented in another forum that I often find myself going to BING because of poor image quality on GOOGLE EARTH. Someone there suggested that they have set the zoom levels wrong in historical images but even the latest ones are often not very useful now.

Having bought aerial photos from some commercial sites, the quality of GE is better for the same shot, at least with GE Pro it is. I did read about the various surveys that were carried out and the quality we demand theses days just wasn't required for most of those so they were taken at a greater height and therefore less able for close zooming and less film. Since digital and GPS has taken over things are far more sharp. The OS mapping aerial photos were taken at a lower lever and even the early sixties are very good quality but in many cases still not as sharp as GE when zoomed as close. A high res scan confirmed this. And yes I think GE is held back but still miles better than some commercial offerings.

Bing coverage is not as good but some areas are very good quality. They also offer some very good oblique views but coverage is mainly cities so no good for my bombing range research! Curiously some oblique coverage (normally from four different directions) seem to differ for the same location. Facing north the building is there but facing east it has been demolished but back again when facing south!

It looks like the poor quality satellite images have overlaid part of the better quality images for Lulsgate. The satellite images all seem to be credited to Landsat/Copernicus and in the 2009 example the east side of Lulsgate is Getmapping sourced for 12/2009 but the west side of the Getmapping view is only available in the 6/2009 layer but there is a strip missing in the middle. It looks like they have dated the satt images the same as the aerial images and as the satt images were added later they seem to have taken priority. 2005 suffers the same fate with half the aerial image missing. This is a great shame and could spoil the GE "experience" especially if those areas were previously okay. This is odd as previously the default image (without the rollback feature on) was always the best image.

My hope is that the satt views will only be available when zoomed out quite a way as indeed they were a few weeks ago. I suspect someone has made a blunder.

Ever since Google dumped of Panoramio I have been worried that all those photos on Google Earth would disappear. They seemed to have stayed - up until recently! They have now all gone, despite the place markers still being present on Google Earth. I am completely baffled why they didn't merely transfer the Panoramio photos on GE to the new platform that would have been blindingly obvious to mortals. The note that pops up is frankly quite insulting, inviting people who uploaded on Panoramio to do it all over again on Google Maps. Why!

The result is that I have hundreds of references that can no longer be traced and my folder of links relating to bombing ranges is now only a quarter of what it was a few years ago. The currently available Google Maps photos available are look to be about a twentieth of the old Panoramio, probably more. What is even worse is that dozens of the ones I looked at were planted mile away from their actual position. With so few I would expect them to have been corrected very quickly, the old one rarely had this issue. On one Humberside Airport was at Manston!

With the flippant disregard of the effort users put into uploading photos to the various sites I begin to wonder if it is worth bothering if the future is to change everything every 5 years? It is also insulting to up-loaders who probably did their uploads when upload speed were not that good.