There are some major updates to Google Maps, Street View and Google Earth that you should know about – and the new and upgraded features should be useful to users of Google’s mapping tools in all kinds of ways.
The updates are described in a blog post by Google, and first we have the addition of historical images on Google Earth, going back as much as 80 years in some places. Some of this footage was previously available in the paid Pro version of the software, but will now be accessible to all users on web and mobile.
“You might want to travel back in time and see what your neighborhood looked like decades ago,” explains Stafford Marquardt, senior product manager at Google Maps. “Or you want to understand how forests have been affected by human activity and the changing climate.”
Certain cities, including London, Berlin, Warsaw and Paris, now offer satellite imagery dating back to the 1930s, making it possible to see in detail how these places have developed and adapted over the decades.
More Street View images
Google Maps is expanding Street View images to 80 countries, with some of those countries getting Street View images for the first time. Additionally, Google says that even more places will get Street View in the future.
The sample photos in Google’s blog post are for Iceland, New Zealand, Brazil, Mexico, Tasmania, Japan, Denmark and France. According to Google, it is one of the most significant updates to Street View in its history (launched in 2007) and the total number of images now exceeds 280 billion.
And finally, in this round of updates, Google says it’s “tightening up” the satellite images on Google Earth and Google Maps. With a little help from AI, new cloud removal tools have been applied to reveal more of the world than ever before, giving you “a renewed global mosaic that gives you a clearer, more accurate view of the Earth.”
If you don’t see the Google Earth and Google Maps updates on your device yet, they will be arriving soon. We saw another update earlier this week, when Google Maps improved the lane navigation interface on Android Auto.