Please offer Wayback World Imagery as a grouped time-enabled service

[CharleyPalmer1]

With the time-slider capabilities of ArcGIS Online, you'd think ESRI's pinnacle imagery service (World Imagery) could be offered as a time-enabled service that displays Wayback tiles and that can be ingested by my personal or Organization's ArcGIS Online web map as a single layer. Why do I have to add individual tile service layers in order to see historical imagery??  Is there a way I don't know about that doesn't involve coding or web app builder? This adds to the already frustrating lack of the ability to group layers!

[LucianPlesea]

Having a true Historical Imagery service would be great, yet building one from the World Imagery is not feasible for multiple reasons, only some of them technical.

First of all, the Wayback Imagery doesn't reflect time.  It is only a sequence of states of the WorldImagery tiled basemap, as they existed in the past.  It is mostly intended to offer access to imagery that has been replaced in the current version of WorldImagery, or the ability to freeze the state of the Imagery basemap, so it is not subject to updates.  Only a tiny fraction of the globe changes at each release, and the acquisition time of those changes is not even linear with the release sequence.  For example some imagery collected in August could be added in an October release and then in the December release add some imagery collected in June.  Esri added source image metadata to Wayback recently, precisely to offer a view into the imagery acquisition time.

To offer a true historical imagery service the World Imagery dataset, which is only a massive collection of tiles, would have to be reverse assembled into the original source images, and then those images added to a dynamic, time enabled Image Service.  Besides being extremely hard to do, this type of use is not allowed by the licensing agreements that cover the imagery basemap data.  Even if all that could be done, it would be a dynamic service that can reorder and blend different time steps, which would need many more resources to operate and would behave very different from the existing Wayback service.  It would not be a fast and free tiled service anymore.

What Wayback does offer is high performance access to historical imagery while staying within the bounds of a tiled basemap technology.  This is what makes it unique and free to use on the ArcGIS platform.

[CharleyPalmer1]

Thank you for the detailed response. It is great to have this resource. However, there are so many layers that it makes it difficult and messy to browse and add to a map (especially without the ability to group layers in AGOL!). I do use the Living Atlas World Imagery Wayback Imagery app to find datestamps I'm interested in, and this has helped. It's just messy and this Idea was a reflection of that.

[BlytheSpendlove2]

I appreciate the detailed response of Lucian. I also agree  with Charley though that it would be really nice to have a true historical imagery service, even though, as explained by Lucian, it would take a lot of resources on the part of Esri and would not be a free service anymore. People see Google Earth and how easy it is to switch between historical imagery on Google Earth, and then they wonder why we can't replicate that functionality using Esri technology. I think it would be well worth it for Esri to look into that as a future investment.