Hi alexkemp,

Yes, you won’t be able to access easily the Esri metadata directly from JOSM (as for as I know). Esri provides this app : Esri Imagery Date Finder that displays the date (and other metadata) of the satellite imagery on the area you clicked on.

Otherwise I created this small app to load all the images on the extent of the map so you don’t have to click on all the individual ones and see clearly the limits of each extent : https://jsfiddle.net/f0qo2j3w/1/

Cheers,

• Léo

Hi RespectableStreet,

Thank you for your answer ( I didn’t thought I would get an answer that quickly on a 1 year old thread :) ). Really good point about the mosaic, I think it is also the same issue with the Bing Imagery for which we get two dates in the metadata : VintageStart and VintageEnd.

The thing that still questions me is how can DG not be able (technically?) to get the date of their images …

On the picture below you’ll see a comparison between Esri World Imagery and DG for the same area. The satellite imageries are obviously the same but Esri can return with its API the exact extent (highlighted in yellow) and a date ( Dec 2016 ) that seems more accurate than the DG one (2014) from what I know of the area.

Image :

Esri is not a satellite imagery provider, they got this image from someone else (maybe even DG) so if they can provide a precise and reliable metadata, DG should too … Once again, not trying to trigger or defend anyone, just trying to understand what’s the real blocking point for accessing the metadata (technical? API still to be built ? confidentiality ? )

Cheers,

• Léo

Hi Kevin,

I’m using a lot free satellite imageries for my work (most of the time linked to OSM) so first thanks again to DG to share your imageries, it really opened new possibilities in the last years :)

But I’m also always amazed by how hard it is to find the capture date of the images …

Bing metadata is a nightmare and I came to the conclusion that it is almost impossible to know it precisely (on this subject here’s a really good article : https://philippgaertner.github.io/2018/11/microsoft-bing-maps/ )

Esri provides an good API but - as far as I know - no user friendly tool to extract the dates (so I coded one : https://jsfiddle.net/f0qo2j3w/1/ )

And now for DG, I checked the Vintage layers you provide but I have to admit that I’m quite skeptical about the relevance of it … I know it is still in beta but in almost all the areas I checked (and I took worldwide examples of areas I used to work on) I found that the date was wrong. Almost nowhere I could find dates more recent than 2016 (and in some areas the image is clearly from 2017 or even 2018) so I start to think that the raster of extent and dates was generated some years ago and never updated (?) …

Well, this comment is not a complaint but more an interrogation about the next steps of DG to improve the access to the metadata, which is almost as important as the image :)

Thanks

• Léo