Satellite / Aerial Photos of World Landmarks

* Notes

   Known Issues:

• Microsoft Virtual Earth does not work at all with the Safari browser. There is some indication that the next version of Virtual Earth (ver. 6) will support Safari. In the meantime, for Safari users, all maps and photos will be provided by Google Maps.

   Observations:

• For areas outside the U.S., Google seems to offer the best quality aerial photographs, but the worst maps. For Google, even our close neighbor Mexico is a big blank area when it comes to mapping cities or roads.
• Within the U.S., the quality of aerial photos varies and it is often a toss-up as to which provider will offer the best quality. That's one reason I made this page so it will be easy to compare.
• From a developer's point of view, the Google Maps API is more advanced, offers more flexibility and has better documentation than Microsoft Virtual Earth. It is also more likely you will find information on the web about using the Google API posted by other developers.
• I originally set up this page to also include Yahoo! Maps, but ran into several difficulties: (1) Yahoo! Maps photos displayed immediately after Virtual Earth photos did not render correctly for reasons I never figured out. (2) In Firefox, several problems arose from an apparent code collision between Yahoo!'s JavaScript code and code that Virtual Earth adds (atlascompat.js) for Mozilla-based browsers. (3) Yahoo! Maps zoom values are the reverse of Google Maps and Microsoft Virtual Earth (i.e., 1 is the greatest magnification and 16 is the lowest).