Mircrosoft has added a birdseye view to micrsoft maps for parts of Ireland,they are amazing but its strange how their aerial/sat maps are _awful_, they seem to have skipped a process and gone for the four angled birdseye views, but you might not think to look at the excellent quality birdseye view for central Dublin after seeing the quality of their aerial maps...
I use flashearth to compare or just go to googlemaps or Live maps
Here are the brilliant birdseye view of Dublin which you can turn to see from four different angles(only two angles further out from city centres).(Click images to open maps).
Liberty Hall and customs house in Googlemaps.
This is how far in I can view Dublin city center! in MS maps.live.com
The problem is it makes it quite difficult to add overlay with mapcruncher(as I explain below).
Microsoft Mapcruncher
Microsoft Live version of Googleearth and Googlemaps/mymaps, its been around for a while but is still in beta and of limited use with low resolution images for maps.live.com for Ireland.
You have to download a small program and then find the area of interest on the map then load the overlay image and match points in the two images so Microsoft knows where to overlay it and account for curvature of the earth and terrain etc.(This with Ireland's low resolution images which disappear if you try to zoom in too far).
You click render, it then splits the top image into tiles to overlay on the server maps (which seems unnecessary on small maps?). You need a web space where you can upload multiple folders and files optimally your own web domain.
Here I overlayed the current image of Dublin airport with what it will look like when the second runway is built.(Source)
See the map; Live maps: New runway for Dublin Airport Mapcrunch
Googlemaps Mapplets
Google have added photos and videos as direct options to overlay on googlemaps, so you can just view and area and see corresponding photos from flickr,panoramio etc, so you view photos like
or perhaps zoom into Croke park
and see videos taken by somebody (badly on their mobile phone) of some past-it rock band or even GAA if that's your sort of thing.
PS. A Canal Bank Walk by kregori
