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Is it possible to determine how current the Bing imagery for a certain area is? I've checked the community blog and searched through the monthly updates, but I could not find my study area.

I found posts where they mentioned updating the imagery for the whole country, but with no specifics (is it really the entire country? Or just most of it?). In the credits in Layout View in ArcMap 10.1, I noticed that while Microsoft Corporation is 2012, the other credits are 2010. Does this indicate that the imagery is from that year?

Cindy Jayakumar
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  • I've tried to find a way to do it for ages, but it doesn't look like there's one. You can't check it on bing.maps.com either. The way around it is using Show historical imagery tool in Google Earth to determine how your study area looked like in the past, and then to see whether you will be able to tell where Bing imagery fits on the timeline - it's easy to do with areas with some sort of development undertaken recently.

    I don't think that credits are good indication of imagery date.

     – jareks Dec 20 '12 at 08:29
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    I just cross-referenced Bing to my house, since due to ongoing construction work I can determine the date of the image pretty well. The not-microsoft date says 2010, but the image is definitely from (mid) 2012. The Microsoft date is (like Google) always the current year, to indicate that the Terms and Conditions are up to date. – GR_ Dec 20 '12 at 08:48
  • Workable solutions can be found here: https://gis.stackexchange.com/questions/437491/how-to-determine-the-date-of-the-bing-imagery-for-an-area-in-2022 – Comrade Che May 02 '23 at 06:03

3 Answers3

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You can try this Bing imagery analyzer for OSM. It should show the bing satellite and aerial photos overlaid with their capture date. Is that what you're looking for?

enter image description here

Here is the direct link to the tool.

R.K.
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As of December 2019 there is this website : https://zoom.earth/ wich at sufficient zoom seems to show Bing imagery and display the date of the image(s) on the top left corner, under the title.

Screenshot of the zoom.earth website

Kadir Şahbaz
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flo64
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    It seems (June 2021!) that they have removed the date feature from this, which is really annoying!! – lisagravy Jun 01 '21 at 17:00
  • I asked this question again for 2022 as all of the answers to this old question seem outdated and not working: https://gis.stackexchange.com/questions/437491/how-to-determine-the-date-of-the-bing-imagery-for-an-area-in-2022 – erik Aug 04 '22 at 12:47
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I have been using the link provided by R.K. for a couple years and it has been extremely useful. However, the "Bing imagery analyzer for OSM" provides only the month/year, and I needed the day too. You can get the day/month/year of Bing images using REST services. Follow the instructions here.

For example, in a web browser, enter the URL below. The places in bold are parameters determined by you. The first parameter is the latitude and longitude of the location you are interested in; the 2nd parameter is the zoom level of the image (integer between 1 & 21); the 3rd parameter is your Bing Maps Key. Note that not all imagery is available at all zoom levels, so if you get an error, try a different zoom level. This method requires you have a Bing Maps key, but you can get one for free.

http://dev.virtualearth.net/REST/v1/Imagery/Metadata/Aerial/55.923,-133.653?zl=19&key=BingMapsKey

Now, if only I could figure out how to get the image time stamp too!

fbiles
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