ESRI used to be clear and detailed probably about 3 days ago. Now it is identical to Bing. Bing always produced “clouds” at this zoom level. ESRI never had any clouds at all. This is making my editing impossible.
Yes, I could go with one of the others, but only ESRI had the detail I needed.
Never used to be that way. In the images I provided in the previous post I had used ESRI to add a couple details from the satellite image (along the lower edge left hand building and the lower right edge a park and on the upper right corner I had added a historical district). Now, ESRI totally obscures those images.
Just to confirm, I went to the ArcGIS site to see if it is the same there. It is. So it is not on your end. It is on theirs. I’m totally bummed out because I was still adding details to buildings and stuff around my area (Martinsburg, WV).
Maybe this was true sometime ago, but nowadays this is not 100% true, in some areas where I collaborate new features are visible on aerial imagery available to OSM, and the imagery available in GMaps is one or two years older.
(my fault, I refer only about the age of the imagery, not about the need to survey on the ground)
“complaint”? I suspect you misunderstand the nature of the arrangement. ESRI is kind enough to allow us to use their imagery for tracing, this required ESRI to invest quite a lot of work to go back to their suppliers and determine if such use would be in order.
So please don’t “complain” to ESRI, pointing out an issue that hey might not be aware of, is naturally quite OK:
I am relieved to see that I’m not the only one experiencing this problem with Esri imagery. I’ve been using it extensively shortly after I started mapping in October, and now in my area (https://www.openstreetmap.org/#map=14/39.2643/-85.8830), the Esri imagery has switched to being identical to the Bing imagery.
Please don’t directly access third party map tiles, even when some versions are available officially for OSM. It is possible that only the officially available ones are actually licensed for OSM. even if the ones you are using were previously licensed.
Has someone already tried to contact ESRI about permission to use the clarity layer? I’ve just pinged two of their employees (who had been very supportive when getting the “standard” ESRI worl imagery officially into iD/JOSM/etc.): https://github.com/osmlab/editor-layer-index/pull/358#issuecomment-359237579.