commented by freebeer (2018-05-18 08:50:13+00:00): Before i head off for a bank holiday weekend blasting the bass and not thinkiing of OSM,
Bing in the coninental Us will be imagery from DigitalGlobe, or in metro regions like here outdated.
There are a lot of areas like here where mapbox is outdated.  That is why Irina and pals made so many nonsense edits.
Of course all imagery will be outdated as it must first be processed to be useful.  I feel OSM is lucky to have acess to imageries within a couple months of capture.
Yes, one cannot generalise which imagery is best everywhere.  That is why I have to throw out my assumptions every time, except for the consistency of the archive imageries (Bing x2) you want to get rid of.
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The quality of imagery depends on your needs.  pick one:  age, alignment offset, leafcover, sunlight angle, detail, spectrum, cloud cover, and much more.
The newer Bing satellite (DG) often has an offset of ten metres, plus is shot from an angle that turns straight roads over hills into curves.
``They should do something like combine the sources and just disable access to the older images.''
Who is They?
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You are aware of the history behind the Claritty layer?  Calling it `beta' doesn't help express its archival status either.
As that is almost continental-wide the oldest imagery, I will let you know I referred the Microsoft team to it when no other imagery had any sign of what they wanted to trace.
And what do you mean by correct?  a year old but off by 5 to 10m over the span of a couple hundred metres?  and so on.
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Your gut instinct is mostly wrong like here where DG is newer.  But it was 5m off where i measured it.
Satellites are up there constantly streaming back images.  The operators sell their images to their regular customers, then when there is no more value, make them available to osm.  Microsoft has generously donated both their street level as well as the stellite imageries (their aerial birds-eye are still off-limits to us).  ESRI is a patchwork, many of the ESRI images are forbidden to osm directly from the sources.  Texas ortho is the only imagery I can expect in metro regions to be the freshest.  Elsewhere local osm chapters pay for access to the government images.
I suspect Mapbox imagery is not their newest, plus they have deliberately degraded its quality to be less competitive, attractive, or useful.
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One thing to draw me to armchair mapping here was the first-world image quality for such a third-world country, compareed to the dire free-to-use offerings in first-world countries, and the third-world state of the map in so many areas.
We first met in ESRI z22 country under a tree shelter,which was why i expected better Esri imagery throughout californication.  But no.
Does iD implement the best-imagery function?  That is, if you go somewhere I expect the besf imagery to be pre-selected, like Basel or Berlin, do you get Bing by default or something better?
I believe JOSM offers this functionality.  But i'm not positive.  At least i know the data is there that for a particular bbox, imagery X is best.
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Are you aware of OpenAerialMap, run by the HOT team?  Perhaps some imaginary somewhere will tickle your fancy, though there is little.
Proper orthorectified and georeferenced imagery sets aren't as trivial as you make out.  I've no numbers for an example, nor a reference for satellite coverage of the same medium-size country.  Some of the ESRI coverage seems to have been stitched from passes only a few hundred metres wide, so a lot of them would be needed for a state.  Nonetheless, governments here get data at least twice yearly, some of which winds its way towards the osm sources.
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I believe JOSM has the ability to show some tile info.  Thought about trying it, rather than turning iD from a beginner editor into an in-brower JOSM?  He asks clinging to his Potlatch and seeing how smoothly Potlatch 1 runs on the equivalent of stone-age equipment...
As far as if the date info is in the png/jpg or in the https metadata, you'd have to point curl/wget at the cloud provider serving Bing tiles and see.  Then try the other providers to see if they've implemented what they promised.
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Note that the seasoned or grizzly veteran old fart mapper will select and align the most appropriate imagery/ies, so it's a matter of training armchair newbies.  Local mappers will know right away if something is amiss and the era of each image.
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But my big question is, who is They?
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a happy whatever-this-holiday-is-called to you, now the weather is loooking up (still cool, sigh)