My Google Map Blog

Last September Google announced that they would eventually drop support for NPAPI in Chrome, a key technology behind the Google Earth plugin. Then in September this year, they released a 64-bit version of Chrome without support for NPAPI and by extension, the Google Earth plugin. However, it was still unclear exactly when support would be discontinued in the 32-bit version. We also wrote a post showing you how some sites have decided to drop the Google Earth plugin in favor of other technologies with a more certain future.

On Monday, the Chromium Blog posted a more specific timeline for the phasing out of NPAPI. See the full details here.

In summary:
From January 2015, the plugin will be blocked by default, but users will still be able to enable it.
From April 2015, it will be much harder, although still possible, to use the plugin.
From September 2015, NPAPI support will be permanently removed from Chrome and it will be impossible to use the Google Earth plugin in Chrome.

The post Timeline for the end of the Google Earth plugin in Chrome appeared first on Google Earth Blog.

Street View coverage continues to expand. There haven’t been any major countries added to the list recently, but within countries the coverage is continuously expanding, and in many places, being refreshed.

The most notable additions to Street View are being provided by the Street View Trekker, which was introduced back in 2012. It is used for capturing Street View inside buildings, such as the Burj Khalifa, off road areas, such as the Grand Canyon, and it can also be mounted on a boat such as was done for Venice and the Amazon. Google even created an underwater version of the Trekker, which is used to capture Street View under the oceans. Some of the most notable locations the Trekker has been used can be seen here. NBC have a short video showing how the trekker is used that you can watch here.

Yesterday’s post about Google Earth imagery updates got me thinking that there is no equivalent map for Street View. There is a map here that shows current coverage, and of course, in Google Maps and Google Earth you can hover the little yellow man above the map and it will highlight coverage areas. However, what would be really nice to have is a map showing the ages of the street view coverage. It could, for example, have a layer for each year since Street View started.

Street View taken from a boat off the coast of Japan.

The Underwater Museum of Isla Mujeres, Mexico.

The post Street View appeared first on Google Earth Blog.

In the past, Google would publish a network linked KML file that showed the outlines of imagery releases, including all historical releases going back to 2009. However, early this year they discontinued it and instead have been publishing a map on the Maps Gallery that only shows the latest release. Also, other than taking a screenshot of the maps, there was no way to save them for later viewing.

Now Google have released a map on the Maps Gallery that once again shows us historical releases. Note that it does not currently include the two latest updates from November 3rd, 2014 and November 8th, 2014. It must also be noted that the dates given are not the dates that the imagery was captured, but rather the dates that the imagery was added to the Google Earth database. In many cases the imagery being added is older than previously existing imagery and gets added to historical imagery rather than the default layer.

There is still no way to extract the KML, which makes further analysis difficult. It would have been fun to do heat maps showing which areas received multiple updates.

If we look at all updates from 2009 to October 2014 we see the map below:

We can see a number of interesting patterns. There is poor coverage over tropical forests, deserts, and northern regions. Tropical forests tend to have cloud cover most of the time, making it difficult to capture imagery with clear skies. Similarly, the northern regions often have snow cover, making it difficult to capture good imagery. It is possible that capturing imagery over deserts is also difficult, or it may simply be that their low populations make them less interesting to imagery providers. Iraq and Afghanistan have received very few updates, presumably for security reasons.

[Update: As pointed out by GEB readers Maarten, Chris and an anonymous email, the ‘Latest Google Earth Imagery Updates’ map has been updated to November 19th 2014.]

The post Google Earth imagery updates 2009 to date appeared first on Google Earth Blog.