Downtown Toronto, for example, is always visible at an extremely high resolution looking closely, you can spot my bike parked outside my old apartment. The areas of these blurred sites range from large complexes-such as airfields or munitions storage bunkers-to small, nondescript buildings within city blocks.Īlthough blurring out specific sites is certainly unusual, it is not uncommon for satellite imagery companies to downgrade the resolution of certain sets of imagery before releasing them to viewing platforms like Yandex or Google Earth in fact, if you trawl around the globe using these platforms, you’ll notice that different locations will be rendered in a variety of resolutions. Yandex Maps-Russia’s foremost mapping service-has also agreed to selectively blur out specific sites beyond recognition however, it has done so for just two countries: Israel and Turkey.

In similar fashion, an old Dutch law requires Dutch companies to blur their satellite images of military and royal facilities-even to the point where a satellite imagery provider once doctored an image of Volkel Air Base after it was purchased by FAS’ very own Hans Kristensen. France, for example, has asked Google to obscure all imagery of its prisons after a French gangster successfully conducted a Hollywood-inspired jailbreak involving drones, smoke bombs, and a stolen helicopter(!)-and Google has agreed to comply by the end of 2018. Google Earth occasionally does this at the request of governments that want to keep prying eyes away from some of their more sensitive military or political sites.

Right click on XYZ Tiles and choose New Connection.Want to know how to make a satellite imagery analyst instantly curious about something? Once you open a project in QGIS, in the Browser window to the left, scroll down to XYZ Tiles. The following is an example showing how to add Google Maps to QGIS.

The Google Maps layers are really Tile Map Services (TMS). If you use QGIS version 3, you have the ability to add Google Maps layers to your map.

Google earth view satellite