On Tue, 16 Aug 2011 20:11:36 +0100, Roger Mills wrote:

On 16/08/2011 19:04, robgraham wrote:
I'm involved in a dispute for Planning Permission. Most of the dispute
revolves round aerial photos and images from Google Earth. Can someone
confirm my translation of the data on a Google Earth picture please.

There are what I assume copyright dates in the middle of the bottom of
the image - in the case of the area I'm looking at there are 4
companies involved all with 2011 against them. If on the other hand I
zoom in to an 'Eye Level' (bottom righthand side) of less than 2000 ft,
the bottom LH corner pops up with "Imagery Date: 1/1/1999". As the
image is clearly taken in a summer period, am I right in taking that
this indicates that the photo was taken in 1998 or earlier ?

Rob

I doubt it. Google Earth - as such - has only existed since about 2005,
based on a product dating back to 2001 acquired by Google.

1/1/99 sounds to me like an arbitrary date, meaning something like "a
long time ago, before we kept proper records of when images were taken".

It could be right - in 1999/2000/2001 I was working on an IT project for
an aerial survey company, and IIRC Google ended up paying for the right
to use that photographic data*. I think January of '99 is a bit early - I
don't think we were loading data until later in that year - but I suspect
any copyright would relate to the dataset as a whole, rather than when a
particular portion of image was loaded into our system.

"our" data was by no means the only lot that Google made use of, either;
ISTR that there were three or four others around that same time, so it
could easily relate to some other company too.

* something like 6TB of images, which was reasonably large for the time.
Funny to think it'd all go on a small number of hard disks these days!

cheers

Jules