Satelite Images for route plotting.

[woodsmith]

I use the OSM cycle map layer in RWGPS for route plotting and double check it by switching to the satelite image which often highlights errors in the OSM track. Often there are are in reality roads/tracks not marked on OSM which exist on the ground or conversley roads and tracks marked on OSM which do not exist in the real world.
The satelite images available on Bing maps are far clearer ( higher resolution?) making road surface identification etc easier but appear to be older as the RWGPS images show roads absent on the BING.
The location I'm looking at , Morocco doesn't have Google streetview so that often useful tool isn't available.
So my questions are.

Is there a way of telling on RWGPS/Bing/google earth when the images were taken?

Is there another free satelite image service which has various months which can be selected for the same location to see if rivers are dry/mountain passes blocked etc

[fatbikephil]

I've never found dates on either bing or google aerials. In general google seems to be more up to date than bing. My OS app aerials seem to fall between bing and google.... Sorry, not much use and not aware of a service which gives dates. I tend to 'date proof' aerials by looking at things like cleared forestry or new housing that I've seen on the ground which is BA use for a foreign country...

[pistonbroke]

Have you looked at wikiloc? I've done a quick search for Bikepacking routes out of Marrakech and it came up with 6. The standard mapping looks ok with the option to download better, the satellite images seem clear enough too. Lots of riders that make up the core users of wikiloc ie Spanish and French go to Morocco so there's a decent library of routes building up

[sean_iow]

When I use Google earth on my desktop at work it's got the date of the imagery at the bottom, quite small writing so easy to miss.

We use Pro now but sure it was also present on the previous version.

[Dave Barter]

A lot of these providers are reselling Landsat 8 imagery and it is hard to know when they bought it and hence the date of the image capture. It could be as old as 2013/14 I downloaded a tile and tried to find out in the EXIF information but (unsurprisingly) there is nothing in there. It's not really in their interest to tell you if the data is old.

Landsat 9 went up in 2021 so anything using this will be more up to date, I very much doubt any free/cheap layers can afford this