My Google Map Blog

Google has quietly pushed out an imagery update, and it covers hundreds of areas in dozens of different countries around the world. Thanks to GEB readers 'Andreas' and 'McMasterde' for letting us know about it.

Google has already updated their "imagery updates" KML file, so you can use it to see all of the areas around the globe that have been updated. None of the imagery is incredibly fresh, most coming from March-May of this year, but new imagery is always a good thing!

If you come across anything noteworthy in the new imagery, please leave a comment below and let us know about it.

Terrain

Since the first days of Google Earth, the 3D terrain has been most of the most amazing features in the program. It makes everything look better, and creates stunning views of the largest mountains in the world (such as K2, seen below).

3D terrain is enabled by default, but you can edit it by playing with the "Terrain Quality" settings in the main [Tools] > [Options] menu.

Trees

Introduced in late 2010, sprouting out of the 3D terrain, is the 3D trees feature. The initial release featured more than 80,000,000 trees in a handful of cities, and Google has added a few more since then. However, the new 3D imagery seems to be replacing the 3D trees so I'm not sure we'll see any more cities get the trees. Google hasn't announced anything about that, but we haven't seen any new trees added in months, and their focus seems to be on the 3d imagery. Regardless, the trees look amazing and are a great addition to Google Earth.

Tours

"Tours" in Google Earth are a great feature where you can record a path for someone to follow, then allow them to watch it for themselves (including audio, image and video overlays). A great example is the "Rebirth of Crissy Field" tour that we posted a few months ago.

An unrelated but similarly-named feature are the new "Tour Guides" that go along with 3D imagery in a few cities. Those are built-in tours that show off highlights in the new imagery. They're currently only available on mobile devices, but the imagery should be out on the desktop versions of Google Earth before the end of the year and presumably the tours will come with it.

NASA recently released an amazing photo of Kuwait City that was captured a few months ago, with the city glowing with yellow lights.

You can view it yourself in Google Earth by using this KML file.

However, what if you want to see the rest of the planet at night? Released back in 2007, the "Earth at Night" layer is a beautiful view of our planet as seen during the night. The quality isn't as sharp as what you're seeing in Kuwait City above, but it's still quite amazing, and we can thank Don Pettit for that. You can view this layer by selecting [Gallery] > [NASA] > [Earth City Lights].

It's a beautiful way to view our planet, and I highly recommend you give it a shot.