Online maps in the fourth dimension

One of the fun things about having an archive of hundreds of photos from each of many construction projects in Centretown is that you can use it to tell when a particular photo was taken by somebody else. I made a reference to it in this post about Tommy & Lefebvre's reconstruction, when I pointed out that if you look at the site in Google Street View from one street, it's at one point in the project, and from another street, the photos are from a few weeks on.

So it didn't take me long to figure out when Google's 45-degree aerial photos (click screenshot below) of Centretown were taken. My Mondrian construction photos were a bust, but this big hole on the next block of Bank Street...

...was a dead ringer for this scene, taken as little as a few hours apart, from July 7, 2008:

Microsoft Live ("Bing") Maps introduced this view earlier than Google did (and with more promotion of it), and lets you look from four different perpendicular directions. Microsoft uses photos that are a bit older, also from 2008, but from before Bank Street was dug up that year (click to go to the page on Bing Maps):

And from my photo collection of the Mondrian, I can tell it was taken not long (maybe a few days) before this photo from mid-May 2008:

Cross-referencing it against my photos of Hudson Park at Kent and Lisgar, I can tell it was taken between May 10th and May 15th (the two closest days for which I have photos of that project), which I already knew.

So then I got my Picasa software to chronologically sort all my photos in all my folders (just search for a term that's in a common folder name, and click on the "search results for..." link at the top of the left bar), and found some photos I'd taken on the evening of May 14, 2008 of the sidewalk/pathway/ambiguous-travel-surface along Albert Street in Lebreton Flats:

And the photos from Bing Maps shows the concrete sidewalk forms, which are empty in the above photo, filled with wet/drying cement.

Assuming the photos were all taken on the same day (which the shadows seem to suggest), badda-Bing badda-boom, they must have been taken at some point on May 15, 2008!