Do any of you use Bing satellite photos for route planning?

Until now, I had used Google Earth to get a rough idea of the terrain of planned routes. But GE's resolution isn't all that great for most of canoe country, and it seems there's always cloud cover over the areas you want to look at.

Bing seems to have *much* better resolution than GE, and is now my preferred source for this sort of thing. (Am I the last to know about this?)

Anyhow, here's what the Ox Lake / Bearpelt Creek area looks like. You can zoom in (not sure how to fix the brightness adjustment) or move to somewhere else if you prefer.

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BTW, you want "AERIAL" not "BIRD'S EYE" to get the higher res. The traffic reports don't work in this area either.

Yep, I just created a "mosaic" of the complete Sabourin River system in Woodland Caribou PP by splicing together a number of captured screen shots.

You can navigate around my click and drag to adjacent areas.

dd

Bing is good except for instances like this.

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DentonDoc wrote on May 9^th, 2013 at 1:49am:

Yep, I just created a "mosaic" of the complete Sabourin River system in Woodland Caribou PP by splicing together a number of captured screen shots.

DD, what do you use for stitching your screenshots together?

For similar stuff in the past, I've occasionally used PTGUI - it's good for some things, but seems to do other unwanted stuff often enough that sometimes it seems more trouble than it's worth.

Lately, I've just been using the "brute force" approach - load a bunch of tif images into Photoshop as separate layers, skew and distort them as necessary to maximize alignment with an underlying topo map layer, then merge the whole bunch into one composite image. That's time-consuming, but at least it gives me full control in keeping the scale consistent with my topo map "projection".

Is Photostitch worth trying? Or Photoshop's built-in stitching algorithm? Or do you have a third, better way that you'd recommend?

Brute force ... I'm using Photoshop.  But since I'm using a rather tight scale, I didn't have to skew/stretch anything on my last effort.

Here is a sample (in WCPP where the Sabourin River dumps into Thicketwood Lake):

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I did tweek the color a bit to make it less blue and more green.

Joe_Schmeaux wrote on May 8^th, 2013 at 11:59pm:

... Am I the last to know about this? ...

You are not last, I was behind you!  I noticed PJ's use of an aerial I knew I hadn't seen in a thread yesterday & checked out Bing.
Some of Quetico is nice quality shot in fall color & very low water -- really interesting if you've been there to see the water levels, for instance in Deux River area or Olifaunt.
Some is missing high res.  Some high res is kind of crappy, as is some of the Google maps/Earth stuff.  I think Bing is ahead of Google in Quetico right now.
-Tom

I too found it inconsistent.  For instance, looking at my house, it seemed to be recent but when I zoomed in, to presumably highest resolution, it time shifted to 5 or so years ago, my new garage disappeared and the 2002 Tacoma I traded in 5 years ago reappeared.

Weird.

It looks like they have (up to) two separate sets of photos: one at Google-res and another at high res, with the software switching between them depending on zoom level. Maybe that's the reason for the brightness change when you zoom in on the link I posted earlier.

I know there are gaps in the data - some areas have no coverage, areas much bigger than the missing section in PJ's screenshot. Apparently Microsoft acquired some 170 terabytes of data in June 2012, so hopefully it's an annual-budget-schedule-driven thing, and they will add another chunk of high-res coverage next month. Don't hold your breath on getting your new car back, though, Bill. :)

Maybe its a time machine in beta testing....

I liked the seasonal difference I saw when I zoomed.

Some places you get different seasons in Birds eye.  I look at that as more information.  As I look at birds eye of my house I have cars in different places depending on which direction I look at the house form.
Some places in Quetico have hi res birds eye.

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The hi res areas are a lot better than GE but it looks hit or miss. the difference is stark. check this area:

sorry I could not post photo as an attachment. The error said volume too large although it was 137kb

scottv11 wrote on Jun 14^th, 2013 at 2:04pm:

sorry I could not post photo as an attachment. The error said volume too large although it was 137kb

It should upload now. Try it again.

I had never used them but have now compared an area in Woodland Caribou with the Google image and even the high rez paid edition Google images and the Bing image is far better. What I assume is hard wood foliage really tells me a lot.

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OK here is the photo I ment to post showing resolution difference

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Marten wrote on Jun 14^th, 2013 at 3:09pm:

What I assume is hard wood foliage really tells me a lot.

Yup. Wouldn't it be nice if we could see it over time?

As I looked at other areas I could see what others are saying about big drops in resolution as you pan around. I was sure glad that an area I need to lay out a route in was hi-res.

After using it more, the Bing hi-res coverage really seems to be hit 'n' miss. The Cache River area in Quetico is great. Most of the Bloodvein River in Manitoba is hi-res, but so dark as to be useless.

But it's nice when it works!

Magicpaddler wrote on May 13^th, 2013 at 10:18pm:

Some places you get different seasons in Birds eye.  I look at that as more information.  As I look at birds eye of my house I have cars in different places depending on which direction I look at the house form. Some places in Quetico have hi res birds eye.

At my house, there are different cars and structures, showing a 3 to 4 year gap between the highest res and a step lower.  Very spotty.