Obtaining 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/aerial photographs can be obtained from Google Earth Pro which can be downloaded from www.google.co.uk/intl/en_uk/earth/versions/#earth-pro You should download the Google Earth Pro on desktop version, rather than use Google Earth on web or Google Earth on mobile, because the latter two do not have the historical image facility.

Finding the location you are interested in

You can find the location you are interested in by entering a place name or postcode in the search box and tapping the Search button. 

When you do this a red marker labelled with the place name or postcode is superimposed on the image. If the marker happens to be directly over, and therefore obscures, detail you are interested in, you will want to remove it. There is no direct way of doing this but you could search again with something else in the search box. For example if you previously searched by postcode, search by road name instead. If you do not want the red marker to appear at all - e.g. because it is a distraction even though it does not obscure detail you are interested in - you could search for a road name a block away and then drag the image to the place you are interested in so that the marker disappears off the panel. 

You can use the navigation bar on the right to zoom in as needed. If you cannot see the navigation bar tap the View tab and tick the Show Navigation...Automatically box.

Adjust the boundaries of the display panel so that the image is slightly taller and it is wide. 

Set View options

Initially, when setting the location and zoom, you needed the navigation bar but, now that you have set location and zoom, tick the Show Navigation... Compass Only box so that the outline of the navigation bar does not appear when you come to take a screenshot.

Tick the Sidebar box and untick all the Layers options then untick the Sidebar box.  The Layers options superimpose information on the image such as the names and locations of shops, businesses and places of interest but generally it is only the image itself (and objective data such as longitude and latitude) which you want to include in the screenshot and not anonymous commentary. 

Make sure that the only other boxes ticked are Toolbar, Historical Imagery,  and Status Bar.  

Finding the historical images you are interested in

Ticking the Historical Imagery box will have caused the time slider to appear. Move the time slider to find the month and year you are interested in. Google Earth Pro will then display an image taken that month or, if it does not have an image taken that month, it will display the most recent image which it has taken before that month - and the slider will jump to the month being displayed.

In fact the the month/year that the slider points to may not be the exact month and year the image was taken but is the latest month/year that the image could have been taken - the earliest date that the image could have been taken is shown in the status bar at the bottom of the panel in North American date (mm/dd/yyyy) format immediately after the words "Imagery Date". So you know what year the image was taken in, and you may be able to narrow it down to a month or a couple of months that year, but you don't know the exact date.  For example the image shown above was taken sometime between 5th March 2008 and 30th September 2008 inclusive. When saving a Google Earth image it is important to do so in such a way that both the "Imagery Date" and slider month/year appear in the image.    

Note: The reason why the exact date is not known is, according to Google, that the display may be a mozaic made up of a number of images taken at different dates, or it may it may be a single image which is one of a number of images obtained by Google from a survey company which did not record the exact date of each image. For example a batch of images may simply have been recorded as, say, "summer 2007". Also note that there is a button in the bottom left hand corner of the panel next to a clock symbol which shows the year of the earliest image available in Google Earth for the location. This is not the year of the image currently being displayed and should not be confused with Imagery Date or slider month/year.

Saving Google Earth images

Once you have found the historical image you want you should save it. Google has a policy of only making available one image for each day and this means that if, some time after you have displayed an image, Google acquires another image for the same day, then next time you use Google Earth a different image might be displayed. This could be a clearer image but it might be a worse image from your point of view - e.g. with cloud cover which just happens to obscure the area you are interested in. So make sure you save all the images you need.       

It is possible to save an image by selecting File and Save or by "printing" it to a PDF but generally you should not use those options because an image saved in either of those ways does not show the month/year it was taken. Rather you should send yourself a screenshot using the email button on the toolbar. A screenshot image will include the time slider and the status bar showing "Imagery Date" so that the date range of the image saved is captured. When sending yourself a screenshot using the email button on the toolbar it is important to make sure that the time slider remains clear with a black background and does not fade making it harder to see in the screenshot. To make sure that the time slider does not fade, first tap the print button on the toolbar. This will bring up the print options and make the time slider clear. Do not do a print but just tap the print button again. This will remove the print options but but leave the time slider clear. You can then tap the email button. 

When you receive the email, save the screenshot JPG giving it a name which includes the year - e.g. GoogleEarth Image 2008.jpg 

Typically you will only be interested in images of a single area. If you are obtaining images of multiple distinct areas then add a brief description to the filename - e.g.

GoogleEarth Image - Rose Cottage - 2008.jpg

GoogleEarth Image - Park Farm - 2008.jpg 

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 March 2024 Disclaimer