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Comment by pjungwir | Hacker News Reader

I wonder what it costs to get these images, and if you could get them more cheaply by flying drones? I guess that would require a presence in a lot of places though. . . . Still, maybe you could focus on just a few cities, and get pictures more frequently than you'd get with satellites? Maybe there is an opportunity there.

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I don't know the cost, but you can get the images here: https://spaceknow.com/

Drones could fly under cloud cover also. Satellite photos are probably less useful for Seattle than for Denver.

Note that to acquire imagery you don't necessarily need to request a new one be shot. Historical imagery often covers what you need, depending on what part of the globe you want to see, and when.

Each image with sample distance to differentiate cars seems to be $10-$48 each.

Rather than drones use large blimps, like google was planning to do with project loon.

I agree with you; I also think there's an opportunity here. I wonder what the biggest cost would be to such a company. Maintenance?

By the time you've paid for a drone and someone to fly it in each city, you might as well just pay someone minimum wage to drive around photographing the lots from ground level. It'd probably work out cheaper.

That probably wouldn't work for image analysis however, since it would be hard to see all the cars in the lot from ground level.

If you drove a Google Street View-style car up and down a mall parking lot, you'd get a lot of information. I doubt that a more in-depth sweep would cost significantly more to do than to just do a single drive by. The biggest cost would be driving to the parking lot in the first place.

And if you were trying to collect information, you'd be able to get a lot more info from the license plate numbers or the make/models of cars. You could also get information on employment by looking for which cars are parked where, since store employees typically have to park further from the entrance. There's a lot of information that you could get from ground-level that you miss at satellite level.

The real question is - is it worth it?

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