Obtaining historical Google Earth images

There are many commercial aerial photograph suppliers which will provide copies of historical aerial photographs for a fee. In addition, free copies of historical satellite photographs can be obtained from Google Earth at earth.google.co.uk See below for how to use Google Earth.

Finding the location you are interested in

To find the location you are interested in, first enter a place name or postcode in the search box and tap the Search button. 

You can then click and drag the image to get to the precise location. You can use the zoom controls on the bottom right to zoom in as needed.

You can tap View - Basemap Settings (or tap the small square showing a miniature map/image) to change from, for example, satellite images to a map, and to add shops and other businesses, places of general interest, boundaries and roads etc. Use whatever helps you find the location you are looking for but, when you have found the location, select Satellite and Clean as generally you only want to capture the satellite image itself (and objective data such as the distance scale): not anonymous commentary.

Finding the historical images you are interested in for the location

Tap View - Show Historical Imagery (or tap the symbol) and the Historical Imagery bar will appear containing thumbnails for each year for which an image is available. You can click to select the year you are interested in and Google Earth will then display an image taken that year. 

You may find that different sectors of the displayed image have different lighting conditions. This might be because a cloud is casting a shadow over part of the image but if it appears that different length shadows are cast by trees and buildings in one sector compared to the other sector, and especially if the dividing line between sectors is vertical or horizontal, then the more likely explanation is that the displayed image is actually a multi-date imagery mosaic - a collection of images taken at different dates and blended together. In this case as you move the cursor from one sector to another the date shown on the left in the narrow grey bar at the bottom (just to the right of "data attribution") will change to show the date of the image of each sector. The blue date in the Historic Imagery bar will not change as you move the cursor and will be the date of the sector with the most recent date.

Saving historical Google Earth images

To save a historic image as a PDF, proceed as follows:-

• Select the year in the Historical Imagery bar to be saved. If the Historical Imagery bar is collapsed - i.e. just an oval with a date - you can tap on the date to expand it to show year thumbnails.

• Move the cursor around the image to check whether the grey bar date changes, indicating that there is a multi-date imagery mosaic. If it is a mosaic but only a small area of the displayed image, on the periphery, which you do not need to save, has a different date, and everywhere else on the displayed image has the same date, you can use the cursor to narrow the window and/or zoom in and/or drag the image so as to exclude the area with a different date from the display, leaving the displayed image entirely of one date only. If it is not just a small area on the periphery which has a different date, but the central area, consider whether you need to save the current image that you have selected - an alternative available image dated slightly later or slightly earlier might be sufficient for your needs and, if so, start the procedure again (from the first bullet point above) and select an alternative date.

•  If the date is the first of the month, or the last day of the month, that could mean that the image just happened to be captured on that exact date but more often it indicates that Google does not know the exact date the image was captured. Google does not itself operate any satellites but purchases images from companies which do. Consequently Google does not always know the exact date - or even month - that all of its images were captured. Some images purchased from suppliers might have been in batches labelled simply "summer 2007" or just "2007" so that the exact date is not known. If you have an image with one of these first-day-of-month or last-day-of-month dates, it may be that you don't need to save that particular image - an alternative available image dated slightly later or slightly earlier might be sufficient for your needs and, if so, start the procedure again (from the first bullet point above, and select an alternative date.

• When saving a historic image it is important to make sure that a single date is shown in the saved image and that the date is accurate. To ensure that only a single date is shown you should arrange the dimensions of the window such that the grey bar at the bottom, with its date, disappears. To achieve this, first tap the "collapse" symbol on the  Historical Imagery bar to reduce it to just a blue date in a oval bar. Then use the cursor to slowly narrow the width of the window. As the window narrows the distance scale in the grey bar at the bottom will also narrow. At some point the grey bar at the bottom, with its date, will disappear and at the same time the blue date in the oval bar will move to the bottom and the distance scale will appear to the right of it. At this point the window should be slightly taller than it is wide.

• Tap on your browser's Print button and select a printer of PDF to create a PDF copy of the displayed image in A4 portrait. In the print panel you may have to adjust the scale to ensure that the whole displayed image, including the blue date in the oval, appears in the print preview. Then tap OK to create the PDF. 

• You will be prompted to specify the filename of the PDF to be saved. Typically you will only be interested in images of a single locality. But if you will, in due course, be obtaining images of multiple distinct areas then add a brief description of the area to the filename when saving - e.g.

2003 GoogleEarth Image - Rose Cottage.pdf

2003 GoogleEarth Image - Park Farm.pdf 

Repeat the above process for any other years you wish to save an image for.

Note 1: Do make sure that the PDF print does include the blue date in the oval. Webpage designers, including designers of Google Earth, may design their webpages with a stylesheet so that a slightly different format appears when printing as compared to the screen display - this is typically used to take account of the fact that, for example, a print is divided into pages whereas a screen display is continuous. But sometimes a webpage design is not perfect so that the print not only has a different format but may in certain circumstances omit items such as, this case, the oval with blue date. If you hit this problem, one solution is to save a screenshot rather than doing a print-to-PDF. But before resorting to a screenshot you could try using a different computer. A webpage can be designed to detect the attributes of the computer display - such as resolution - and to use that information to modify what is displayed (e.g. perhaps using ordinary text where more stylish graphics might be used for a computer display with higher resolution) but, depending how the webpage is written, it might also modify the print stylesheet as well so it is worth trying a print-to-PDF on a different computer before considering resorting to a screenshot.

Note 2: Google does not make available, in Google Earth, all the images is owns. If, some time after you have displayed an image, Google acquires another image for the same location taken the same year, then next time you use Google Earth to look at that location for that year a different image might be displayed. This would in general normally be at least as clear as the previous image but it could be a worse image from your point of view - e.g. most of it might be clearer but there might just happen to be a long shadow obscuring the particular point you are interested in. So, when you find the image you are looking for, make sure you save it when you find it because if you don't save it then, and you go back to it a month later, there is a possibility that that particular image might no longer be available. 

Note 3: There is also a desktop version of Google Earth called Google Earth Pro but using that is more complicated than using the web version as described above.      

Disclaimer

This information page is designed to be used only by clients of John Antell who have entered into an agreement for the provision of legal services. The information in it is necessarily of a general nature and will not be applicable to every case: it is intended to be used only in conjunction with more specific advice to the individual client about the individual case. This information page should not be used by, or relied on, by anyone else.

The information on this page about specific computer techniques is provided for information purposes only. Every reasonable effort has been made to ensure that the information is accurate and up to date at the time it was written but no responsibility for its accuracy, or for any consequences of relying on it, is assumed by me. You should satisfy yourself, before using any of the techniques, software or services described, that the techniques are appropriate for your purposes and that the software or service is reliable.

This page was lasted updated in August 2025 Disclaimer