Google Earth query

[robgraham]

I'm involved in a dispute for Planning Permission. Most of the dispute revolves round aerial photos and images from Google Earth. Can someone confirm my translation of the data on a Google Earth picture please.

There are what I assume copyright dates in the middle of the bottom of the image - in the case of the area I'm looking at there are 4 companies involved all with 2011 against them. If on the other hand I zoom in to an 'Eye Level' (bottom righthand side) of less than 2000 ft, the bottom LH corner pops up with "Imagery Date: 1/1/1999". As the image is clearly taken in a summer period, am I right in taking that this indicates that the photo was taken in 1998 or earlier ?

Rob

[Roger Mills]

I doubt it. Google Earth - as such - has only existed since about 2005, based on a product dating back to 2001 acquired by Google.

1/1/99 sounds to me like an arbitrary date, meaning something like "a long time ago, before we kept proper records of when images were taken".

[robgraham]

On the basis of the intelligence of the other party, that answer is quite good enough !

Rob

[Newshound]

It might be. I recently pulled all available images off for a particular site and these were dated Jan 2000, Jan 2001, Jan 2002, May 2010. The changes were consistent with the dates being about right. Interestingly, the 2001/2002 resolution was a bit better than the 2010.

[John Rumm]

Its probably a fair bet. Google earth would not have existed then, but their source data predates them. However how fine grained the attributions are is hard to say since they blend together many sources of imagery.

What are you trying to prove?

[Jules Richardson]

It could be right - in 1999/2000/2001 I was working on an IT project for an aerial survey company, and IIRC Google ended up paying for the right to use that photographic data*. I think January of '99 is a bit early - I don't think we were loading data until later in that year - but I suspect any copyright would relate to the dataset as a whole, rather than when a particular portion of image was loaded into our system.

"our" data was by no means the only lot that Google made use of, either; ISTR that there were three or four others around that same time, so it could easily relate to some other company too.

• something like 6TB of images, which was reasonably large for the time. Funny to think it'd all go on a small number of hard disks these days!

cheers

Jules

[robgraham]

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The current owner is claiming the picture is 2009 and proves continuous use since the business on the site collapsed in 1994. It's more a case of proving he's a lying toad than what is in the picture.

Many thanks everyone for your input - the history information is useful if it comes to a legal scrap.

Rob

[John Rumm]

About Imagery Dates

Google Earth displays the approximate date of displayed imagery in the status bar at the bottom in the 3D viewer. As you mouse over a location, this information depicts the date of the imagery. Note that this date is only approximate.

It might be worth looking at what data

have on the area. IIRC they assembled all their images by overflying the country in strips, and at known dates and times.

[Mike Tomlinson]

In article , robgraham writes

There are alternatives -

NASA Worldwind, Microsoft Virtual Earth. One of those may have the info you want.

[Man at B&Q]

For my postcode thay have 1940-47, 1999-date and 2004-date but no exact date is given. The only copyright notice I can see is 2010 in all cases. The 1999-date is nearer 1999 than today and is almost certainly the millenium map data.

MBQ

[John Rumm]

Google earth also has a history option...

Do a "View-> Historical Imagery" and you get a new entry just below the scale indicator on the bottom left that lets you switch to older images.

I had a play with this on some test properties where I knew when stuff had been changed. The older 1999 data looked plausible for the age. The stuff that claimed to be 2006 I know was actually showing something from mid 2008

[robgraham]

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Thanks for that John - that threw up a picture with a definite 2003 date on it. Poor resolution, and doesn't really give any more info, but interesting never the less. Rob

[Jules Richardson]

They were the folks I mentioned in my post... but some places were re- flown (due to atmospheric issues), plus it took quite a while to process and load the images into the system - I can't remember if we recorded a timestamp of when a photo was taken, or merely when it was loaded.

I do still seem to have all the source and design docs, but I don't think I have any database backups - otherwise I'd be able to quote dates for particular gridrefs :-)

cheers

Jules