neave

So live/daily is for zoom levels 0-9, and the archive goes back 20 years to 2000. Zoom in, and older imagery dates will vary based on the location.

Yes, images of your house/area will be older. Near real-time imagery is only available at lower zoom levels.

It takes a long time to take satellite/aerial photos of everywhere on the planet in high resolution, so 2018 is quite good in the geospatial industry.

Yes, near real-time is available up to 500m/pixel (level 8 zoom). To see higher resolution you can use planet.com but that’s a commercial service.

Yep, it will be old at that zoom level. Zoom out to level 8 and you’ll get near real-time but you won’t be able to see your house.

It does - imagery is dated to the nearest month from level ~12 and higher. (See top left on desktop, bottom on mobile)

You’re exactly right. Sentinel Hub process a huge amount of data in real time, so it’s no small feat.

Yes, the night side uses a combination of infra-red imagery with a static image of the Earth at night. Without that image all the landmass and cities would disappear into black, so it helps give the IR imagery context. And it looks nice. It’s a common technique called GeoColor.

Planet Labs do this (planet.com) but $$$

High resolution will be older imagery. You won’t be able to see your house in near real time unless you pay to task a satellite from a commercial provider like Planet Labs.

I’d love to, but their API is currently cost prohibitive for a free-to-use website.

I'm the developer of Zoom Earth. "Live" is shorthand for "near real-time". But, you're right. Most visitors simply want to see their house from space. Which is understandable, but also kinda depressing. They could look at _anywhere in the world in near realtime_, but they wanna see what their roof or garden looks like.

Meteorologists love it though.