Pond Boss Forums Like Post

I wanted to measure the area and perimeter of my refurbished pond, but the imagery of my property dates back to 2019 in Google Earth. So, my friend came over with his drone and took some nice overhead photos, like this one:



There is a way to import this image to Earth, scale it, and still utilize the measurement functions.

Actually, I had to take an additional intermediate step and overlay the drone photo with the aerial image in Bing maps. Bing imagery is from 2022, still before my pond construction, but contains a current landmark (the rectangular platform in the above pic) that makes it easy to orient and scale the latest drone image.

Once I had that combined image created, I went to Google Earth > Add > Image Overlay. This opens a dialog where you can insert the image, make it transparent, and then use the green handles to size, rotate, and pan it into the correct position on the underlying Earth imagery. In this case, I used the T-shaped dock as the landmark to orient and scale the overlay image correctly:



Once that is done, the measurement tools can be used as usual. Here, I created a polygon around the new pond, and Earth correctly computed area and perimeter.