A few days ago a few mappers in the UK noted that Bing imagery seemed somewhat out-of-date. I noticed it because it appeared not to show recent housing developments until zoomed in at z20. I found a development just outside the village of Llanbedr Dyffryn Clwyd whilst mapping rooftop solar in Denbighshire. My workflow for solar mapping uses Josm. As all the new houses had solar panels I wanted to add the buildings themselves, and I find the way in which imagery can be aligned easier to use in iD than in Josm (particularly as the offset needs cancelling in Josm which does not fit task-based mapping over several thousand square kilometres). So I did it a little crudely in Josm, only to discover that at z20 the imagery was available in iD, so I tidied things up a bit.

I didn’t think much about it until a local mapper in the area commented that Bing seemed a bit behind. This seemed a bit more significant, so I looked at my local university campus which is under continual development and therefore has lots of features which enable one to age imagery. To my consternation the zoom levels down to z19 showed a building which was demolished at least 7 years ago. Whilst looking at this area just now, the z20 imagery appears to be disappearing from cache.

A short distance South of the University is the Nottingham tram line which was well under construction in 2013 because a major bridge was put in place in September of that year. The ‘updated’ Bing imagery now pre-dates the tram development, and any construction work on the Chinese Studies building which opened in January 2013. It does show a new lecture theatre on the main campus which was built post-2009. It therefore appears that the imagery has reverted to a state around 2011 or 2012. Co-incidentally or not, this seems to be the same as ESRI Clarity.

I’ve looked at a couple of other places where I know construction work bridges this period:

• CMU Campus N of Forbes Avenue, Pittsburgh. A lot of new buildings replaced a car park and Forbes itself has been extensively re-modelled to incorporate bike lanes. Bing imagery at all zoom levels seems relatively recent.
• Hardbrücke, Zurich. The former terminus balloon loop of the Number 8 tram has changed and the tram now enters and crosses the bridge (opened in 2017 IIRC). Bing imagery pre-dates the tramline extension.

Several others have noticed similar changes in the UK, and there is a relevant Github issue for the iD editor. The deterioration in usefulness of the Bing imagery appears to be associated with a recent Pull Request designed to eliminate problems with OSM editors exceeding a daily allowance from Bing. Regular Bing Maps shows much newer data, e.g., at Hardbrücke and the QMC tram stop.

I’ve posted a few screengrabs of these location on Imgur

I don’t know how long this will take to resolve at the code/organisation level, but I think it is important that people editing be aware that Bing imagery may be considerably older than they may believe. Clearly at this stage it has not inconvenienced too many people editing. Bing Imagery in other editors is not affected.

PS. The Bing imagery in other editors is largely recent Maxar imagery and was updated around the end of April. In many places across Wales this new imagery is poorer than that which preceded it (true also in Nottingham, where I could see the works for a new underground 11kV cable which I watched being installed).