If you look at the FAQ from Google Earth website the first questions are :
- How old are the images, How often are they updated ?
- Are they captured real time ?
- Why is there no sharp images over my house ?
Even if these questions may seem a little bit basic, they show very well the expectations of GE users. Once you have surfed the Grand Canyon, New York and Paris you want to know if the image of places where you live, where you work look like "reality". And of course most of the time you will not see your new car parked in front of the house or maybe not even the house itself. And now for the user these few hundred square meters or hectars have much more value than the nice image of Central Park. How relevent is an information if it is not sharp and fresh ? What is the value of a data if it does not cover your field of interest?
First involved in providing GIS professionals images for technical use we have created tools to guide us on our missions out on the field to shoot the images correctly and help to process them rapidly. As we use live image and gps transmission between the aircraft and the ground we have all it takes to find out the print of each image. Turn this to kml and there you are...
So now, no you will not be able to update the Grand Canyon image, but you will have a good start to answer our first 3 questions :
- How old are the images, How often are they updated ? The image is 20 minutes old and can be updated in 1 houre, 1 day, 1 month...
- Are they captured real time ? You would not do better with your camera
- Why is there no sharp images over my house ? Is 5 cm sharp enough?