I’ve been a great fan of Google Earth since it first hit the scene.  Like most people who use it, I found my own house, my workplace, places where I’d lived previously etc.  In the early days, many of the images were quite fuzzy – I could find my street, but my house was represented by an amorphous blob of colour – simply no detail whatsoever.

The Rise

Over the years, the images improved immensly, to the point where I can identify my car parked outside my house and even the kids’ toys in the garden.

Other places that I regularly visit on Google Earth  are Ekaterinburg in Russia, where my wife comes from.  Again, the images of our apartment there have become clearer and more detailed over time.  The small, rural village where my wife’s family live still remains a blur of random splodges of colour.  We await better images, but we’re not holding our breath.  We suspect it’s a very low-priority area to be photographed.

The Decline

Many places I regularly visit on Google Earth have been updated within the last few months, and to be honest, there seems to be a distinct degradation in the quality.

The images of my home, and of several previous addresses, have decreased in clarity.  It seems they have taken a step backwards.  Is this some sort of privacy ruling, or are they simply purchasing lower-quality images to save money?

What really disappoints me though, is that the new images of Ekaterinburg have evidently been taken during the winter months because the very long shadows cast by the many tower blocks because the sun is so low in the sky, all but obliterate the details of whatever lies behind them.  The shadows fall almost due north, meaning the sun was directly in the south.  Therefore the images were taken around mid-day.  In fact, the sun is so low in the sky that the shadows occupy more land area than the buildings that are casting them.

In addition to this poor choice of time to update the images, the pictures themselves are again, less clear than before.

Google has done wonders with the performance of the software, and the addition of Sky and Ocean, but the quality of the images is definitely dropping.  I understand that Google doesn’t want to have too many images that are out-of-date, but I’d rather see out-of-date images that are clear than the fuzzy offerings they seem to be making of late.