One of the neatest features added to Google Earth in the past few years is the Historical Imagery added in Google Earth 5. Being able to go back in time and few older imagery is such a neat thing to do.
Now that Google is starting to roll out fresh Street View imagery around the world, we’re getting a glimpse of a somewhat similar feature in there. There’s two parts to this:
First, Google has created a special “Build the Memory” site for imagery in Japan, allowing you to see before and after shots of towns affected by the earthquake and tsunami.
It’s not a full-fledged “historical” view, since it’s only for Japan, but it’s a very neat way to see that imagery.
The also added the oft-requested feature of putting dates on the Street View imagery. It’s been a fun game to try to determine when imagery was captured, but now they tell you the month and year right on the imagery while you’re viewing it!
The dates don’t appear when you’re using Street View inside of Google Earth, but I would expect that’ll be coming in a future update.
You can read more about these updates on the Google Lat Long Blog.
About Mickey Mellen
Mickey has been using Google Earth since it was released in 2005, and has created a variety of geo-related sites including Google Earth Hacks. He runs a web design firm in Marietta, GA, where he lives with his wife and two kids.
Month and year of SV images will be better than current guesswork, for example in trying to link visual appearances with known economic problems and changes. I suppose it would be too much to add a little clock face symbol for time of day – to help explain the otherwise strangely deserted streets often seen ?
It will be interesting yo see how Google treat patchworks of images of apparently different dates, for example sometimes found where streets intersect.
Please display the full date of streetview imagery (example: Dec 17, 2011)
Please reply
google earth is a great 3d tool of the earth , and also there are little details show the potential of this tool—> like this post, this old images on the google earth have been keeped and reserved , we could easily check how looks like those destoried before…….and why not —> that google earth creat a timeline museum ? or something which is not just in 3d, but in 4/5 demension . that people could check in different periode, different figure of the earth ,some architectures….etc. google could do much more things use the orginal point google earth and develope thousands way to explore the data/information of the world!