We just added over 3,600,000 km² of current satellite imagery from Maxar, including significant updates in the UK, Italy, Finland, Japan, India, and China. This new imagery provides key updates to our global addition of 135M km² made at the end of 2020 and blends seamlessly with our existing imagery.
We’ve seen tremendous increases in demand over these areas, and worked with Maxar to add their most current basemap imagery. The latest high resolution imagery provides a great backdrop when orienting yourself in a new city, charting your upcoming trip, and sharing your most recent hike.
"Updated imagery from Mapbox gives Strava athletes broad area awareness for planning and memorializing their activities. Having imagery that extends beyond cities opens up better trail exploration, especially across Europe, South America, and Japan."
— Will Meyer, Senior Product Manager at Strava
We also greatly improved the quality of our imagery by removing significant cloud cover across our map. We replaced 78% of the clouds in these areas with clear imagery, uncovering land features that were previously blocked from view and delivering a more consistent experience.
The end result is an update that covers 6 continents and parts of 42 countries. In total, we added over 150,000 km² over each of North and South America, Africa, and Australia, 1.3M km² over Europe, and 2.2M km² covering Asia. The new imagery covers approximately 25% of the global population.
The new imagery is current, too. Coverage in Great Britain and Italy is now 2 years newer on average than before, and Norway and Finland are 3 years newer. There are similar improvements over major cities as well. São Paulo, Rio de Janeiro, Riyadh, Cairo, Mumbai, Hong Kong, and Singapore all have imagery that’s at least 1.5 years newer.
You can get started working with this imagery in Studio, and learn more about it here.
