Google Satellite Imagery Tricks For Surveyors

For those of you who are dabbling or working hard with aerial imagery and Google Earth, here are a couple of tricks that I have learned along the way.

Finding the capture date of Satellite Images

If you wish to know the date when satellites captured those aerial images that you now see in Google Maps, you will have to use Google Earth for that (for some reason, these dates aren’t displayed on the Google Maps website).

Launch the Google Earth program, search for any location and zoom in as much as possible. You should see the capture date of that image in the status bar as highlighted in the above screenshot.

Also Helpful for Finding the capture date of Street View Images

If you happen to live in a country where Google Street View is available, you can use the Google Maps website itself to determine the date when Google Street Views cars were in your area shooting pictures of the neighborhood.

Simply run a search for an address in Google Maps and switch to the street view by dragging that street view icon to the map. The image date will be displayed in the status bar again though in this case, Google only reveals the month and year of the picture but not the exact date. 

 Special Thanks to Amit Agarwal (@labnol) for tipping us off to this!

Know When Satellite Imagery Is Updated In Your Geographic Area

If you are inside Google Earth or switch to the Satellite View in Google Maps, you can see aerial images of your home and most other places of our planet.

These images are updated every few years (or months depending on the area) and Google, in the long term, is very likely to switch to high-resolution imagery for most countries and regions. Now that Apple has joined the Maps business, providing high-quality imagery will be an even higher priority item for Google.

Get Email Alerts for Google Maps & Earth

If you would like to know when Google Maps (and Google Earth) is updated with new satellite and aerial images of your area, or any other point of interest, they have built a new alert system called Follow Your World that should keep you in the loop.

To get started, sign-in using your Google Account and mark one or more areas of interest. You can do so by either clicking the points in Google Maps or enter the latitude and longitude manually.

And that's a rap! Google will monitor these locations and will send you email alerts as soon as updated satellite and aerial imagery data is available for these areas in Google Maps and Google Earth.

In summary,you need to use Google Earth to determine the capture date of Aerial Images and Google Maps for finding the date of Street View images.

Have you discovered any helpful Google Maps or Google Earth tips you'd think other surveyors could benefit from?  Please share!