Today I quickly put together a timelapse video using Google Earth Pro, a free-to-download piece of software from Google.
This was for our local nature group, to visualise not just the housing development that has happened around here, but also to what has actually happened to some of the farmland that has been rewilding over the last decade.
I originally sat down this morning to get a decent quality map for plotting out a tree planting project for our estate. One of our nature group, Madi, had applied to the Woodland Trust for one of their community trees packs, and we’re getting 105 delivered next week.
Of course, all of this is a follow-up to the ‘rewilding a new-build garden‘ blog post I wrote last year, which turned into the Gardener’s World spot this summer.
I have started using this work, part of Smithery’s Three Projects for 2024, as an example in talks of how strategic design can take some of the things a lot of people who work in design, or are ‘design-adjacent’, can do to make a different on local projects. I’m just back from Smashing Conference in Antwerp where I finished my presentation with it, and will share that recording as soon as it appears.
Anyway, I shared this timelapse on Linkedin today, and Tom and Miguel asked how I’d made it.
As promised then, a little tutorial on how you can do it for your area too…
- Download Google Earth Pro – it’s free, and will work on PC or Mac
- Zoom in to the area you want
- Press ‘u’ to take of the Earth tilt – it gives you a flat map to save
- Click the ‘Historical Imagery’ icon – a clock & green back arrow
- Then you can select the years you want to save images from
- The ‘Save Image’ icon is then three from the end. Give it a title, choose ‘maximum resolution’ and save
- If you are careful, you can save each year without moving the map like this into one folder
- I then edited it together using Adobe Premiere, but if you were to save all the images to your phone or iPad, you could easily use the iMovie or Movie Studio Editor to turn the images into a film
- Share with your friends, neighbours… and have a chat about what you see. The neighbourhood seen from above is a very different place…
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