GEHistoricalImagery is a utility for downloading historical aerial imagery from Google Earth... and now also from Esri's World Atlas Wayback
Features
- Cross-Platform! Windows, macOS, and Linux. No installers, just binaries.
- Find historical imagery availability at any location and zoom level
- Specify one or more dates to mix and match imagery from different times
- Optional automatic substitution of unavailable tiles with temporally closest available tile
- Outputs a georeferenced GeoTiff or dumps image tiles to a folder
- Supports warping GeoTiffs and dumped tiles to new coordinate systems
- Fast! Parallel downloading and local caching
- Lots of usage examples (links below).
Commands
| Command | Description |
|---|---|
| info | Get imagery info at a specified location. |
| availability | Get imagery date availability in a specified region. |
| download | Download historical imagery. |
| dump | Dump historical image tiles into a folder. |
To learn about defining regions of interest for these commands, please refer to the Regions of Interest article.
DEMO_VIDEO.mp4
Ideally you should use the Release binary packaged, but I've provided gehinix.sh to download, build and run GEHistoricalImagery.
The script will:
- download and install the dotnet sdk (if necessary)
- Clone and build the master branch of this repo (if necessary)
- And finally run GEHistoricalImagery with arguments
wget https://raw.githubusercontent.com/Mbucari/GEHistoricalImagery/refs/heads/master/gehinix.sh
chmod +x gehinix.sh
./gehinix.shUpdated 2025/12/03