[neave]

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.

[neave]

Also, it's good for monitoring wildfires. For example, here are fires currently raging in the Arctic: https://zoom.earth/#view=67.86,151.46,6z/date=2020-07-20,am/...

[anigbrowl]

I guess it's pretty normal to check your own place because you know it well enough to rate the quality of the imagery. In this case, whatever you're using offers better and more recent resolution than Google Earth at greater speed so it's my New Favorite Thing.

Do you have a WMS interface?

[guenthert]

> They could look at _anywhere in the world in near realtime_, but they wanna see what their roof or garden looks like.

I'm sure, they are interested in more. They might pick their home first, as they are familiar with it and can compare the pictures you provide with their mental image. You have to gain their trust first.

[jerkstate]

Why not just say how old each image is, like with a color overlay? “Zoom past this level and you will be looking at 400 days ago” etc

[neave]

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

[raphman]

From which year are the cloudless images shown when deselecting the live/daily layers? There seems to be one per month but all from the same year, right?

It's interesting to see how winter is taking hold of the planet - but a little bit disappointing that I cannot compare snowy areas between different years.

[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.