You may think that you have a lot of images on your smartphone but that"s nothing compared to what Microsoft has been collecting for its Bing Maps service. In a new blog post, Microsoft said it has now added a massive 165 terabytes of new satellite and Global Ortho images to the Bing Maps database.
Microsoft claims that the images cover 38 million square kilometers on six continents (North America, South America, Africa, Australia, Europe and Asia; sorry, Antarctica).
The blog post adds:
As of today the Global Ortho project is 85% acquired and published. Just this month, Bing Imagery Technologies hit a significant milestone by completing 100% of aerial photography over the United States. The photography in Europe is slated to be finished by this fall and all updated imagery should be published by the end of 2012.
You can check out the Bing Maps World Tour App right now to see all of the new and updated images. It includes the aerial photography that covers what Microsoft calls 160 "areas of interest" spread out over 1.03 million square kilometers for the latest update. It adds, "To date, Bing Maps has a total of 1,266 AOIs that stretch across 9.54 million square kilometers!"
Source: Bing Maps blog | Image via Microsoft