Find the Exact Date When a Google Maps Image was Taken
Find the exact date when Google Street View cars captured those images of your neighbourhood. Or when satellites and planes took those aerial pictures of any location on Google Maps
Curious to know the exact date when Google cameras captured those aerial and street view photographs of your home (or any other address) on our beautiful planet? Well, you can find the dates easily both in Google Maps and Google Earth.
Find the capture date of Satellite Images
If you wish to know the date when satellites captured those aerial images that you see in Google Maps, you will have to use Google Earth for that. For some unknown reason, Google doesn’t display these dates on the Google Maps website or the Google Earth web app.
Launch the Google Earth app on your desktop, search for any location in the sidebar and, this is important, zoom in an area as much as possible. Now hover your mouse over the map and you should see the capture date of that satellite image in the status bar as seen in the above screenshot.
Finding the capture date of Street View Images
If you happen to live in a country where Google Street View is available, you can use the Google Maps website itself to determine the date when Google Street Views cars were in your area capturing pictures of the neighbourhood.
Go to maps.google.com and search for an address. Next, drag the yellow “Pegman” to any area on the Google Map to switch from aerial to street view. The image capture date will be instantly displayed in the status bar as shown in the screenshot below.
Unlike Google Earth, the capture dates available inside Street View images only reveal the month and year of the picture but not the exact date.
Also see: Find the Location where a photograph was taken
To summarize, you need to use Google Earth (desktop app) to determine the capture date of Aerial Images and Google Maps for finding the date of Street View images.
Amit Agarwal
Google Developer Expert, Google Cloud Champion
Amit Agarwal is a Google Developer Expert in Google Workspace and Google Apps Script. He holds an engineering degree in Computer Science (I.I.T.) and is the first professional blogger in India.
Amit has developed several popular Google add-ons including Mail Merge for Gmail and Document Studio. Read more on Lifehacker and YourStory