We’re pleased to let you know that Google Maps 2D data is now available through Cesium ion. This is the first step to expanding the global imagery options you have through ion as well as helping you prepare for Bing Maps to be removed. Look in the coming months for more information on these topics.
We’ve also made it easy to include Google Maps 2D Tiles directly in your CesiumJS, Cesium for Unreal, and Cesium for Unity projects if you have your own Google Maps account.
Read more on our blog post, and check out these great CesiumJS Sandcastles (as well as the sleek new Sandcastle UI):
Historical imagery is definitely an area that I feel there are many uses for. Not only for retrieving imagery at certain periods, but sometimes the area of of interest has cloud cover, snow, bad shadows or is a collage of two totally different looking captures. Yet imagery from 6 months ago was perfect.
I got about halfway through implementing Google’s historical maps with Cesium - but it was a much bigger job than I imagined because it wasn’t “official”. And being against their TOS, couldn’t justify more time for something I wanted just to be a POC until an official integration came along.
Google still haven’t announced an API despite it being under consideration, but ESRI’s wayback machine has one. Or are ESRI competition?
I also got dragged away from implementing this, but hopefully it will land in CesiumJS at some point.
There also have been some progress on the official Google Issue Tracker with linking some private blockers, and priority being re-evaluated, so they might take the decision at some point to use an official OGC standard spec like WMS-t for publishing their Historical Imagery, the same way they used OGC 3D Tiles for Photorealistic Cities.
Oh, no! Why? Bing has so much better color representation. I prefer Bing over Google for so many projects where resolution is much better. Can you elaborate more on why Bing is being removed and when will it happen?
@kentzversky Bing Maps was officially deprecated by Microsoft starting June 30th, 2025, though because Cesium is a Bing Maps Enterprise customer, our access to Bing Maps that we provide through ion remains in place until 2028. See this blog post for more information: Bing Maps end of life timeline in Cesium ion
Work is being done to add support for Azure Maps - what Microsoft is replacing Bing Maps with - to CesiumJS and Cesium Native Runtimes.