About RewindEarth & Its Data Sources

RewindEarth is a free tool for looking at the past from above. Paste a US address and it finds every distinct aerial snapshot on record for that spot, then lets you scrub, animate and compare them.

How it works

Esri publishes a new version of its World Imagery basemap every few weeks, and every previous version is preserved in an archive called Wayback. That archive now holds roughly 190 dated releases going back to February 2014.

A new release does not mean new photography everywhere. So rather than showing you 190 identical pictures, RewindEarth queries the archive for your exact map tile, compares the underlying image data across every release, and keeps only the ones where the picture genuinely changed. What you scrub through is real change.

All of the imagery is fetched by your browser directly from the archive. Nothing about your search is stored on our side unless you press Share.

Data sources

Limitations we want to be upfront about

• The archive begins in 2014. There is no photographic imagery here from before then.
• Dates are publication dates. The day an image was published to the archive is not necessarily the day the aircraft flew. Treat archive dates as an upper bound.
• Coverage is uneven. Cities are re-photographed far more often than rural areas.
• This is not a survey. Nothing here establishes boundaries, ownership or legal rights.

Who makes it

RewindEarth is built and maintained by an independent developer. It is not affiliated with Esri, Maxar, the USGS or any government agency. It is supported by advertising so that it can stay free with no account and no watermark.