Niagara Falls Sattelite Pictures

[+ToonAl]

Can anyone from the Falls area or anyone else explain why on Google Maps the satellite images of the Falls area in Canada at least are about 4 years old. I living in a suburb of Toronto and there are at least 3 images of my house in the last few years.

 

But I go look at the Falls and Great Wold Lodge is under construction. I was there on the weekend and across the way is Gale Force geocache. It is next to a rec complex but there is nothing in the picture. I am trying to figure out from the Sat Map where i went wrong but it is years out of date.

[+Keith Watson]

I had the same thing happen when I checked out a bridge I crossed East of Golden when I was out west a few weeks ago. N 51 16.706 W 116 48.405. If you look at it in Google Earth and look at the pictures people have posted, it is a massive bridge. Or you can look at images of it here.

[7rxc]

When I drove down to Ontario this May, I was checking out caches along the route... It was a bit funny to see the Streetview 'bubbles' take off cross country around built up areas... Those pics showed a 4 lane highway with traffic, the images were of raw countryside in many cases. Case of big planet, relatively few pictures of a lot of it. I do believe they have a contact address for significant errors posted there somewhere... they use that to speed up the process of updating.

 

Doug 7rxc

[+Juicepig]

i still live in a green blur somewhere...

 

I think there is a video of me crying about it on Youtube

[+Westacular]

"Satellite view" is a bit of a misnomer, since the high-resolution images are actually stitched together from aerial photo surveys. Google licenses these images from various sources, and updates them every few years, depending on the area. It's patchwork. You use the "report a problem" link in the bottom corner to request updated images in cases where the photo does not reflect the current reality. (Also cases where the road data is missing or incorrect.) They might not fix it instantly, but it will at least help them keep track of what to prioritize in their updates.

 

If you look at the data using Google Earth, it will actually tell you when the photographs were taken. The Niagara Falls images are mostly from 2005 and 2002.

[+Dr. House]

The finding of that cache should probably not be done from the side of the fence that the new arena now resides, but rather from a little access road just north of Bridge Street on Victoria Avenue. It's on the right-hand side and loops under the Victoria St. overpass. I believe it's some sort of old access road for the tracks that used to operate through there but now get you to the trails instead.

 

As for why the maps are like that, I'd imagine it has something to do with focusing on large cities primarily and then looking at outlying areas afterwards, though I truly don't know.

 

Cachers in this area do tend to prefer their caches be placed in parkland or on the Bruce Trail, and those areas haven't changed much, so maybe that's another reason for the outdated maps