My wife was messing around and zoomed down to where we live, and I immediately noticed several discrepancies that point towards the map being at least half a decade out of date. My dads riders cars were out by the fence(Dad's been retired for 2 years now), Swingset isn't in the yard, that's been there for 3 years, and most noticeably of all, my grandmothers boyfriends car is parked where my car now resides: My grandmothers been dead since December 2006. What's the point of a map that doesn't update at least every year?

Assuming you're looking on satellite view, they're actually just photographs taken from a plane stitched together. Plane fuel ain't cheap.

The image of my house is from last summer. I always thought it was a satellite.

It's different from area to area, just as the street views update differently from area to area.

The maps are still accurate as far as roads are concerned and addresses as well (well, for the most part, Google sometimes done goof here). The images, though, aren't kept as up to date because of a single, simple thing: They aren't cheap to come by.


Google uses a mixture of both satellite and plane images.

Last time I checked, the pic of my house still had the car I got rid of over 8 years ago. So your guess is as good as mine.

I tried to base duck hunting spots on an image from 2004. Doesn't work.

ive seen it update for my living area once in the last 10 years.

but now ive got this bizarre feeling when i consider how long google maps has been around.

It's never been updated where I live since it first started

Judging by mine it is definitely Summer 2009 or Summer 2010.

In general more populous cities get updated more often, but it's largely determined by who is paying for the pics to be taken. These aren't all commissioned by Google, quite often someone else commission the photography and then Google purchased it. This is why you can get extremely high resolution pictures of virtually anywhere in the Netherlands but many small US cities aren't well-covered.

My wife and I have lived in this house for over eight years, but until about a year ago GE showed the previous owner's pickup in the driveway. It currently shows our old minivan despite having gotten rid of that before the pictures updated.

Where i am its never been updated actually when you scroll down my street its bright and sunny, and when you get to the end of the street the sky is full of black clouds and the ground is wet, and alot of major roads in the city arent even on google maps, and the city has changed so much since it was done alot of houses and building have been demolished, roads opened and closed and intersections changed, and sections of the city that were paddocks when it was done are now covered with houses.

Well, that certainly makes sense. I wish I could see a few more details so I could better ascertain exactly how long ago the picture was taken. My best estimates would range it from about 5 years old, to 8 1/2 years old. Unfortunately my dad was at work in that pic, so I can't see what car it is he's driving. Or what car I was driving, as my wife was obviously at work as well.

Mine tends to update once a year or so. For awhile you could see me tending my garden in my plaid pajamas. Thank god that's gone now!

For a long time Google Maps showed the construction site for our new train station, which was built back in 2003. They finally updated the maps not long ago and now they are very up to date.

Looks like my house was updated a few days ago... The truck is parked exactly where it is right now and the tree has the leaves on it now.

They haven't updated the overhead picture of our house for a couple years but apparently they finally changed Street View one. Looks about 2 years old now instead of 3-4. And...they have blurred out my car's license plate this time. But doing that on cars in the street is a little haphazard. That's interesting. And hubby's blurrily visible in the yard. hahah, he won't be pleased.

Doesn't google use the images from other company's and the military? So that would mean its not up to them when new photos are taken.

I was completely surprised to find updated photos of my town, because I live in a very remote area. But I think it was an update of Tasmania in general.

@HARVEY
There is a timeline feature on google earth that shows older photos, so you in your pajamas still exists.

My new house hasn't been updated lately.

My girlfriends house has my old truck I just sold parked out front, so that's got to be fairly recent. Also the street view car must have been through the area not too long ago, judging by the looks of things.

The street view for my old apartments is just weird to look at. My grandpa's car is there, and he lives in Ohio now. My super old truck is there. All of my old friends cars are there, we've all split off in different directions now. It's a really weird picture.

My friend's old house has his sister's old car on street view, and my old truck on satellite.

I sort of got mini addicted to this. I'm done now.

Even the street view is years out of date.
It only shows my dads Vauxhall, which he sold on a year ago.
My mum is out cutting the grass, in a top she stopped wearing 3 years ago, oh and she doesn't cut the grass anymore for the passed year and a half.

Unless they just recently changed it, the Google Street View of my home documents a rather traumatic period of my life from late spring 2008. One night while at the keyboard playing an MMO I started coughing up wads of bright red blood unstop. Threw on some clothes and drove myself to ER. Ended up with a nearly week long hospital stay and a "procedure" on my lungs.

Where it ties in to Google Street View is due to weather. We had been experiencing a prolonged period of heavy rains. My property is in a low spot, with poor drainage. By this time the ground had become quite saturated.

I had three Cypress trees lining one side of my lot. The Cypress is a shallow-rooted tree. The ground became too waterlogged to support them. By incredulous coincidence they picked that very evening to uproot and fall to earth, one leaning against my neighbor's house! So slow was their fall that I was totally unaware of it (and the neighbors away for several days). I noticed it only while getting myself into the car for the trip to ER.

At the time I could of course do absolutely nothing but shake my head at life's injustice and continue on. Luckily, I later found out that the trees had fallen so gently that the neighbor's home sustained no damage. He's something of a handyman and simply cut the offending limbs away. He even found someone to cart the fallen trees away as firewood at no cost to me.

The Google Street View of my house shows those Cypress tress flat on the ground! That means the the shot was taken between their fall and eventual removal, a period of several weeks. I'm guessing nearer the latter, as the ground looks to be bone-dry in the photo.

An irony. With the Cypress gone, the only tree in my yard was a Bradford Pear. It features prominently in the Google image. It too is now gone, thanks to unrecoverable damage done during a severe ice storm several years later.

-Decrepit-

I know of one spot that was updated a few weeks ago. It's a piece of public hunting land that was burned for restoration purposes. I was out there the day after they burned it.

The street view mode around here hasn't changed for at least 3 years- I know because I'm on it, waiting for the bus to school, which I last attended 3 years ago. On the satellite mode, our front garden still has a tree in it, which we got rid of two years ago after it got diseased and died. We built a driveway there for my car when I passed my driving test two years ago. So the satellite view is at least two years old.

I'm not entirely convinced that addresses are updated on the map either. A few weeks ago a friend gave me her address so I could find my way to her party- google maps was insistent that her house was an abandoned petrol station.

Street view in my village still has an angry man chasing the car down the street. Happy days.

They do update it every now and then cause I checked near where I live a while ago and a new building had appeared. Generally they seem to do big cities first I just find it creepy how they seem to be doing the whole world.

has anyone seen pictures from a collection called "The 9 eyes of google street view" before? http://www.guardian.co.uk/artanddesign/gallery/2012/feb/20/google-street-view-nine-eyes-in-pictures#/?picture=386213498&index=0