Bing Maps Aerial Imagery into Desktop themes

Some of the best imagery from the Bing Maps Global Ortho Project is collected into Windows 7 Desktop Themes.  These themes change your PC desktop experience as the images rotate through on a regular basis so you never know which part of the world you’ll be looking at next! The United States version is the most content-rich Windows 7 Desktop Theme with nearly 200 images from all parts of the Continental United States, and has had almost a million downloads. The European version just launched last month and contains photos from 10 different countries in Western Europe. Once downloaded, both of these themes are updated through RSS feeds as new imagery is available. For a deeper dive on these themes, check out this post . What are you waiting for? Go download one today!

Bing Maps Aerial Imagery – United States
Windows 7 desktop theme
Click here to Download
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Bing Maps Aerial Imagery – Europe
Windows 7 desktop theme
Click here to Download
Click here for Details

Bing Maps: Extreme high-res imagery in Joplin Tornado app

The new Joplin Tornado app documents the massive destruction from the May 22 tornado with extremely high-resolution imagery. Surdex, one of our Global Ortho flying partners, captured these images 36 hours after the event at an amazing 7.5 cm resolution (which means each pixel represents an area about the size of a standard post-it note). Surdex is making these images freely available to government agencies as a public service (see their website for details).

When you visit the app, you can flip back and forth between the two sets of imagery to better understand the tornado’s devastating power.

Before:

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After:

After_Max_Zoom