Is there a way to access better satellite imagery for Azure Maps?

Question

I need higher resolution imagery for use in my application. Years ago bing announced orthographic imagery. For some reason bing on the web gets higher resolution imagery than azure maps. I want to know how to access the same quality imagery. My imagery is coming from the vexcel while the bing map shows tom tom. I don't know what that's about but I'm going to need a different map provider if this can't be rectified.

Answer

Azure Maps uses the same aerial/satellite imagery as Bing Maps. The TomTom copyright is for the road data. Bing Maps does have pockets of the map where you can zoom in beyond zoom level 19 (in a very few places). For map tiling services its very unusual for a service to do that, so it isn't currently supported by Azure Maps, however I will highlight this with the Azure Maps team ensure they are thinking about how to handle this in the future (pretty sure they have already started looking into this).

Bing Maps does have Birdseye imagery which is higher resolution that shows aerial type imagery at an angle to the horizon. That's not currently in Azure Maps, but the Bing Maps website is using the Azure Maps Web SDK, so there is an integration built already and likely just a matter of the team making the backend services and data available in Azure. I'm not sure on the Azure Maps teams plans are for this, but I personally would expect this to be available in the future. Note that Bing Maps doesn't retire until 2028 (4 years from now).

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Is there a way to access better satellite imagery for Azure Maps?

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