Google Earth's 20th Birthday New Feature Brings Time Travel

The post Google Earth's 20th Birthday New Feature Brings Time Travel appeared first on Android Headlines.

Jun 24, 2025 - 23:50

It’s time to pick up some birthday candles, as Google Earth just celebrated its 20th birthday. To celebrate, the company is unveiling some new and interesting features. One new Google Earth feature is called Historical Imagery, and it will give you an exciting view of how the world has changed over the years.

For people who are interested in seeing how the world has changed over the years, Google introduced Historical Imagery for Maps back in 2014. With this feature, you’re able to look at archived images of different locations and see how those places have changed over the years. You’ll get older imagery depending on the location that you look at. For example, you will be able to see imagery of Houston, Texas, as old as the 1940s. However, you will be able to see images of France from back in the late 1800s. Google is not only using satellite imagery, but it’s also using aerial photography images.

Historical street view is coming to Google Earth

This is a very neat feature, and we’re sure that people will spend hours using it. Well, Historical Imagery is now landing on Google Earth. To access it, open Google Earth and go to your layers. When you do that, you will see the historical imagery option. Clicking on that will change the view slightly. You will be seeing imagery from the most recent flyby.

Up top, you will see a timeline with the years indicated. When you click on a year, you will see imagery taken from that year. Just know that as you go further back in time, you will notice a pretty stark degradation of quality. Furthermore, certain areas will not have imagery available. In any case, it’ll still be fun to look through and see how the Earth has changed over the years.

The next feature is for professional users. This feature gives you AI-generated insights for certain areas using Gemini. So, if you want to know in-depth information about an area’s climate, Gemini will be able to give you a pretty in-depth rundown. Right now, this feature is only available for users in the U.S.

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