Old images are mainly used to detect changes over time for a particular region. Based on your requirement and accuracy level, you can get old satellite imagery every using several platforms, including Google Earth.
To get old satellite imagery, you require the desktop version of Google Earth. Although Google Earth displays current imagery automatically, you can also see how images have changed over time and view past versions of a map. Just go to Google Earth and enter a location in the search bar. Click on view and then on ?Historical Imagery? to see the image you want for a particular time.
There is an option to zoom in /out to change start and end dates that have been covered by your timeline. If you want, you can even import GPS tracks from a specific time.
Turn on the sunlight feature to view the effect of the sun and sunlight across the landscape and by clicking on ?sunlight? you will get the level of sunlight at your current location. Drag the time slider left or right to change the time zone. For more assistance, watch this video.
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Google Earth is simplest to access, but there are many other sources also that provide date and time-based imagery without any charge and subscription-like USGS data. You can also go for low and medium-resolution images from other sources like Landsat or Sentinel. They are updated more frequently. You can also try Nasa Earthdata portal to get plenty of Landsat images.
Other sources of old satellite images
?Esri?s way back living Atlas? is a great source to get satellite imagery from past. Though it is in the initial stage, it has added a good volume of images.
USGS Land look, having a collection of about 7 million scanned historical images and it also provides you with a step-by-step tutorial on how to download imagery from the USGS Earth Explorer. The USGS Land Look has Sentinel-2 and Landsat imagery dating back to 1999. After getting the required image to can export it in JPG, GeoTIFF or PNG format.
NASA Worldview, another name in the list, has 600 global satellite imagery layers with full resolution. Adjust the date using the time slider to step back in the year you want.
Planet Labs has a team of ex-NASA scientists. They are using low cost, lightweight, microsatellites to get images. You can get images from 2009 for your area of interest.
Google Earth has an enormous collection of historical imagery that is available free of cost. Try the above sources and find out which gives you the best results. Read more such stuff at www.thegeospatial.in
