Sometimes I use Viamichelin to plan how best to get from a to b. There have been times when Viamichelin wouldn't - no matter what instructions I gave it - take me the route I wanted to go. On those occasions I google-earthed, and what d'you reckon? The minor road I wanted to go down was clearly blocked by avalanche or flood or whatever. So I think it's a great tool when you need to get down to the finer detail.

If you update Google earth regularly you will see that they do update the pictures fairly frequently, depending on the area you live.

As I am near a royal palace, and until a couple of years ago it was pixillated, Now you can see my house but my son's is pixillated as it is near an airforce base.The base wil be closing in the next year or so so I hope it will be unpixillated then.
By a friends house you can even see their horses in the field!

And there is the famous shot of the nude sunbather in Amsterdam. Poor woman.

I use Google earth for recording my trips and where I took photos(I have a GPS logger for my camera), but I don't post them to the Google community.
I like to see where I am going and then where I have been!

"I have a GPS logger for my camera"

How cool is that? Tell us more about it! Brand/model/cost

I have one from Qstarz, no idea what it cost it was a present.
Sony also do one, and there is a really neat one now called the ATP Photofinder, which will add the GPS data to your EXIF straight onto your memory card without the need of a computer.

Not for research per se, but I did use Google Earth extensively for planning. The idea was to keep track of places of interest including addresses/notes and put these on the map. (I was inspired by a poster on this site whose name escapes me who has done the same for restaurants in Rome.) In Google maps, you can create custom maps, but they are limited to 50 markers at a time and a fixed in the order added. So, if you add some restaurants and then some shops and then another restaurant, the last restaurant is at the end. GE lets you move things around and keep things organized. The problem with GE is that the mapping functionality, i.e., showing a clear image of the streets, is limited. I did a lot of work to convert it to a Google Map using the Mapbuilder.net framework and a number of self-written computer scripts (and a lot of time). (I spend part of my workday writing Python scripts.) To see the final product, check out http://www.sanschagrin.com/Italy2007/RomeMap.html. In the end, we printed the maps (in sections) and carried them with us, which proved immensely useful in the common situation when "where is there to eat around here?" or "where exactly is that shop?".

Paul

Actually, it's amazing what you can see if you look hard enough...

http://www.geogreeting.com/view.html...E4T81+lzQ8gA#t

Give it a minute to load.

Jim

Sorry, hopefully second time lucky;

http://tinyurl.com/2l8cdr

Jim