Today we are releasing our map of Google Earth imagery updates for 2016. Download this KML file
Let us know in the comments if you find any interesting sights that we have not yet covered.
Eastern Europe got noticeably more imagery than Western Europe. We guess this is because Western Europe mostly already has high quality aerial imagery. Most of the updated imagery in Western Europe is aerial imagery attributed to Google and we believe gathered by Google.
The Ukraine is an exception as it is still censored along with Syria, Iraq and Afghanistan, none of which received new imagery in 2016.
The maps show the approximate locations of imagery updates from January to November 2016 classified by month. As far as we know there are no December images yet in ‘historical imagery’. The maps are created using the Google Earth API / plugin, which is set to be shut down a couple of days from now (January 11th, 2017).
There is some recent imagery in Google Earth that has not yet made it to ‘historical imagery’, which is not included in the maps. Also keep in mind that Google sometimes adds old imagery, so during the course of 2016 they would have added quite a lot of 2015 or older imagery which is not included in these maps and in the future they will add more 2016 imagery.
Imagery updates dated 2016, January to November
Speed up the animation by dragging the slider to the left to better see the seasonality of imagery, a topic we have discussed a few times in the past:
Preferred seasons for gathering imagery
2015 imagery updates animated
About Timothy Whitehead
Timothy has been using Google Earth since 2004 when it was still called Keyhole before it was renamed Google Earth in 2005 and has been a huge fan ever since. He is a programmer working for Red Wing Aerobatx and lives in Cape Town, South Africa.