We were recently having a look at the historical imagery of Lusaka, Zambia, and we noticed that there is a lot of historical imagery for the last two years. There is an image nearly every week. Lots of historical imagery provides the ideal opportunity for animations, so here are two that we tried out.
The first animation uses about one image per month for two years. The idea was to try and show the changing of the seasons.
The second shows a shopping mall (East Park Mall) being built. It consists of 134 images captured almost weekly.
You can adjust the speed of the animations by dragging the slider below each animation.
It would be nice if Google Earth could do this sort of animation natively. It is possible to create a tour with historical imagery and we have in the past created tools to help do this. However, Google Earth cannot animate faster than about one image per second and that is really too slow for the above animations to look good. For comparison you can download the two tours here. Unless you have fast internet it could take a while for all the images to load and require a lot of download data.
About Timothy Whitehead
Timothy has been using Google Earth since 2004 when it was still called Keyhole before it was renamed Google Earth in 2005 and has been a huge fan ever since. He is a programmer working for Red Wing Aerobatx and lives in Cape Town, South Africa.
Colin 't Hart says
Can you turn these into real videos?
PaSKud says
Are there any statistics where are most dense covered places in historical imagery?