Secret Scotland

One side effect of the link-up between Live Search (Virtual Earth) and Multimap that I mentioned recently is a new set of aerial images for Scotland.

I’m sure the details will be listed on a dedicated blog somewhere else in cyberspace, but I’ve long given up trawling them in the hope of spotting relevant updates as they happen. They’ll happen anyway, without me reading about them, and I’ll notice while I’m looking at a relevant view of the ground.

I’ve had a chance to look ate quite a few spots, where I can recall what the aerial used to show, and the new images provided by the service is much cleared and more detailed in many case - though there are, it must be said, still vast deserts with no detailed coverage at all… yet?

In terms of the age of images being presented by the revised system, I’m fortunate to live in a spot that has been updated, and from the houses shown can place the images to 2007, as we had (and are still having) a burst of frantic activity as surrounding houses and driveways are ripped apart and re-assembled. We also had some new road surfacing plus the installation of obligatory 20 mph zones (as opposed to the much more numerous, and strangely useless ‘advisory’ type) which have extended road marking and warning lights to show when they are in force. This compares with our incumbent of Google Maps, which has older imagery - I forget when we worked out the ones we looked at were taken - with our local version dating back to 2002 or so, and still the same today.

(I’ve just spotted the Google update, from the start of April, no joy for Scotland, with not a square inch mentioned in the listings. Maybe next time.)

I’m not criticising, far from it. One of the problems with the online mapping service is that there is a clamour for it to be up-to-date, so all the ‘kewl’ people can point out their abode (or advertisers show off their clients). However, for our purposes, while the updating process is welcome since it shows what we can find today, it is also a double-edged sword, as progress and development on the ground sweeps away many of the old and historic sites we are interested in. The older aerial view was actually a useful research tool. There is a method by which the old tiles (the maps and views are made by seamlessly tiling smaller images) can be called up, although I haven’t accessed it for ages, and it only works with Google Maps, so is only really of use to advanced users and programmers.