Google is adding more than 1,000 new images to Earth View, which it says is its biggest update yet to the collection of colorful landscape images from Google Earth. The collection of photos taken from space now includes 2,500 images from locations around the world in resolutions up to 4K, according to a company blog post.
Earth View gathers some of the most interesting and compelling images from Google Earth and enhances them, then presents them in the Earth View gallery or via its Chrome extension. The project is a spinoff of Google Earth, a 3D representation of Earth that uses satellite images and aerial photography to present landscapes and scenes from a different point of view than we usually see them. Earth View now includes a color map to search landscapes by color palette.
Late last year, Google said its Street View and Earth projects cover 98 percent of the places around the world where people live, which includes 36 million miles of Google Earth imagery. The Earth View gallery was launched a decade ago, according to the blog post, and its images are used as wallpapers, screensavers, and as part of an interactive exhibit in Google Earth’s Voyager, a kind of guided online tour.
“My hope then is this funny, little project—along with Google Earth as a whole—moves us to care more deeply about this strange but kaleidoscopically beautiful planet,” Google Earth product manager Gopal Shah wrote in the blog post.