2023: The Year We Went BIGGER

The end of the year is the perfect time to take stock and review what your team accomplished over the last 365 days. As always, we knew we had some great things to celebrate, some significant milestones that continued to push us forward as the largest aerial imagery program in the world. And no surprise–it’s only getting better and bigger! 2023 was a year full of major achievements; check out some of the highlights below.

GLOBAL REACH

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What a year it was for expanding our global collection! We continued collecting in hundreds of places, adding 7 new countries to the mix for a total of 33 countries in our imagery library. This means giving you more views in more places all around the world.
Even more amazing—we published 57 million images (yes, that’s MILLION). What does this mean? It means we jumped from processing on average 100,000 images a day in 2022 to now more than 150,000 images a day in 2023.
That massive amount of data came from publishing over 6.5 million km² across our 2023 collection plan.

U.S. EXPANSION

Earlier this year, we made a big announcement that we were expanding our collection in the contiguous U.S. which included additional collections in urban/metro areas—up to 3x/year in many cities.
We more than doubled our urban collection of 7.5cm resolution from 2022 (500,000 km²) to 2023 with 1.1 million km².
We also collected 3 million km² in rural areas at 15cm resolution.
In total, our fleet collected 4.1 million km²which was 98% of the original plan, all despite some very challenging weather patterns and smoky conditions impacting many parts of the country
We continued to collect disaster imagery after major catastrophes (hurricanes, wildfires, tornadoes) to support communities in need and help our customers and partners such as the Geospatial Insurance Consortium.

PRODUCTS/PLATFORMS

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Our popular Elements product that delivers automated property/building insights expanded so now customers get multiple pieces of valuable information where we have information on properties and on buildings in every country. This includes 12+ attributes focused just on the property such as detecting hardscape information, distance of a pool to a home, whether vehicles (auto/boat) are detected. For building attributes, there 30+ attributes, including just 18 alone focused on the roof that identify if there is roof staining and how (vent/algae/water pooling), how many roof vents, satellite dishes, skylights, ac units are detected, and so much more. Plus, every new building captured gets analyzed so insights are always readily available.
With Viewer, you asked and we listened by adding 7 new tools and multiple feature enhancements, tools that include Export GeoTIFF, Import WKT and GeoJSON, and so much more! Customers can also pull vital property information with the new PIF X Property Report which enables full details on all homes covered in a single report; no need to input individual data one by one.
We also announced not one but TWO new UltraCam camera sensors: the Dragon 4.1 and Merlin 4.1.
And all our imagery and data is published and available via Esri apps and software

Helping Industries Do MORE

All of these achievements, improvements, milestones for the year are meant for one thing: to help support the many needs of those we support across multiple industries. Whether it’s insurers being able to perform faster underwriting thanks to Elements data, or Government entities supporting broader public safety initiatives or better transportation networks, or Telecom building more reliable and sustainable 5G towers, or Utilities managers monitoring assets with ease across urban and rural areas.

Our data and imagery touches so many areas and provides detail and insight that can’t be found with satellite imagery and is delivered on a scale that goes beyond drone capabilities. It’s the ideal combination for those needing access to real ground truth that is accurate, trusted, and readily available in so many areas.

And while this year built even more upon our successes of last year, we can’t wait to show you how we already have plans bursting at the seams for 2024 that will push us even further. Don’t miss out! Sign up to get our newsletter to stay in the loop on what’s coming and when for 2024 below.

Happy New Year!