OpenStreetMap Forum

Tim OD

New Member

Registered: 2020-06-18

Posts: 1

Out of date satellite image

The satellite image used by OSM is at least 5 years old - is there any reason for this and is it possible to get a more recent image as the background?

R0bst3r

Member

Registered: 2015-04-23

Posts: 686

Re: Out of date satellite image

Reason is that they are free to use for OSM.
Newer images are available in commercial services that means if you want to invest a lot of  money you can buy license for usage within OSM.

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OSM Profis sollten Anfänger mehr ermuntern und mehr unterstützen, damit die Gemeinschaft wächst und vielfältiger wird. Momentan vergrault man immer noch gerne.

muralito

Member

Registered: 2012-09-04

Posts: 1,918

Re: Out of date satellite image

The satellite image used by OSM is at least 5 years old - is there any reason for this and is it possible to get a more recent image as the background?

Not everywhere. Here the government released 2019 high quality aerial imagery, and some updates of lower quality were taken in march 2020.

Tordanik

Moderator

From: Germany

Registered: 2008-06-17

Posts: 2,840

Website

Re: Out of date satellite image

For most locations, more than one set of images is available. In iD (the online editor on osm.org), you can switch between them with the layers icon on the right. Looks similar to this:

(Or you can press the "B" key.) There isn't always a clear best option, as there may be a trade-off between how current the images are, the resolution, how correct the positions are, lack of clouds and leaves, ...

Also, what's available depends on what organizations owning such images have allowed us to use for mapping. We don't have our own images.

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OSM in 3D: OSM2World

alan_gr

Member

Registered: 2017-11-27

Posts: 128

Re: Out of date satellite image

Which set of satellite images are you looking at, and for what part of the world? Usually there are several to choose from. You can see them by editing the map in the browser and looking for Background settings on the right, or just hitting B should also work. For example for Ireland I can see Bing, two sets of ESRI imagery, two sets of Maxar imagery.

Edit: turns out I was typing while Tordanik was posting so I ended up basically repeating the same thing...

Last edited by alan_gr (2020-06-18 20:57:26)