This kind of imagery looks great wherever skyscrapers are around – say, in New York City:īecause Google regularly removes the oldest available versions, all of this is rather ephemeral – a year from now (which, at the time of writing, was July 2021), the invocations of this tool that have created the GIFs above may yield totally different results. It's also fun to look at airports and center pivot irrigation fields through the lens this tool provides:Īs an alternative to the usual straight-down imagery, which is great for navigating but obscures the verticality of buildings and structures, Google Maps also provides oblique views shot at a 45-degree angle – from all of the four cardinal directions – for many urban areas. There's usually two or three different views of any given area available in the "version history", which can yield neat 3D effects (the attributes contain the invocations used to generate them):įor areas of the world that have changed significantly recently, flipping through the imagery versions is almost like a timelapse – consider the port of Beirut before and after the 2020 explosion on the left, or the perpetually-over-budget-and-behind-schedule construction of the new Stuttgart central station on the right. Scroll down to learn how to set it up on your machine, or stay up here for some examples. This weekend project is based on ærialbot, a previous weekend project of mine. This Python-based tool automatically crawls its way through these versions, figuring out which provide unique imagery and downloading it for a user-defined (that's you! you get to define things!) area, eventually assembling it in the form of a GIF.
The folks maintaining Google Maps regularly update the satellite imagery it serves its users, but outdated versions of the imagery are kept around for a year or two.