[macfantn]

my townhouse still is just empty land when i search for it and it was built in march of 2004

[Chuckit]

I don't think the images were new even when Google Earth was.

[macfantn]

lame, i want live high res video feeds with xray vision

[irunat2am]

Burn a smiley face into your lawn with gasoline..one day it will happen. One day..

[Cold Warrior]

Originally Posted by macfantn 

lame, i want live high res video feeds with xray vision

I'll settle for more google street views into girls' showers.

[Doofy]

How often does Google Earth update?

The ones in my area are about 4-5 years old. And they've only just been put up, like three/four weeks ago - before that the whole area was just a low-res blob.

[ebuddy]

Originally Posted by Doofy 

The ones in my area are about 4-5 years old. And they've only just been put up, like three/four weeks ago - before that the whole area was just a low-res blob.

Like Area 51?

[analogika]

The pics of my old neighborhood were replaced with *older* ones at the same resolution a while ago.

[ghporter]

Pictures in my area are a couple of years old-they have almost finished adding to the high school behind us, a project they started about two years ago, and the pictures don't even show any clearing for the new buildings.

I suspect that Google updates their database as new pictures are available, and that sometimes they have "licensing issues" with some of their images.

And a lot of aerial images of "sensitive" locations are edited for security reasons. You are NOT allowed to see the actual roof of the White House, for example, because there's "special" stuff there. What stuff? I don't know-and that's the point. But type "area 51" into the Google Earth location bar-you'll get FULL resolution (~1m) imagery of the Groom Lake test center. It's not really called "Area 51" by the way.

"Area 51" is an Air Force in-joke. The standard Controlled Area badge has 50 area number spots on it. When you're authorized access to certain areas, you get a badge that has only the numbers of the areas you're allowed in exposed, and all the others are blacked out. How do you allude to something that's not really there? Give it a number that is not found on the Controlled Area badge.

[Doofy]

Originally Posted by ebuddy 

Like Area 51?

Area 51 is clear as a bell here.

Until 3/4 weeks ago, my turf was like this:
http://www.zen10381.zen.co.uk/ge_blob.jpg

Now it's like this:
http://www.zen10381.zen.co.uk/ge_good.jpg

But that car on the yard has been sitting in that top barn for at least three and a half years now.

[Sherman Homan]

Area 51 is clear as a bell here.

That is what They want you to think.... You can't see the lunar module that They used to film the moon landing, can you? But it is there, right next to the space ship from Alpha Centuri that you can't see on google.

[JoshuaZ]

Hiroshima City had nice high res pictures right away, except for a BIG strip down the center that ran right through the peace park and atom bomb dome that was super LOW quality. This past year they updated the images and that strip is now high res. So weird that the city was lacking in that area.

The same happened in my area. It was all super low res, and still mostly is. Now for some reason the little island school I teach at is there in all super high res glory, but the city I live in (400,000 people) is super duper low res.

Come on guys! Give me some high res pictures of my city!

[ghporter]

You all know that Google doesn't actually commission the aerial photography, right? They buy it (or license it anyway) from whomever it is that has it. So you can't expect Google to just invent the pictures-there has to be some reason for someone to do a new aerial survey in order to get the pictures taken in the first place, THEN Google can add those new pictures to Google Earth.

Two examples: where I grew up in Southeastern Michigan

...and a place I lived a while back in Austin, Texas

Obviously the imagery of Austin is much higher res than the imagery of Flat Rock, and I'll bet the Austin images are more recent than those of Flat Rock.

[Doofy]

BTW Glenn, the image host you chose there just spammed me with full-screen PartyPoker popups.

[ghporter]

I de-linked the thumbnails. I've never heard of ImageShack doing anything beyond asking for credit... Bizarre!

I have been having trouble with my own web site (the service seems to have some problems seeing that I've paid), or I wouldn't have even bothered with ImageShack for this.

[Drew]

Well, It obviously doesn't update much, because my yard is still completely covered in trees, and theres still two buildings behind it. You can see the tin roof on one of them, though.

[willed]

Yeah, Oxford has only just gone high-res in the last couple of weeks, and that's still with imagery at least two years old (can tell because of building work). That's Oxford UK too, not 'Oxford Missouri' or somewhere.