I once expressed my love for Google Earth and I still love it but I always missed having hi-res images of Lucknow. It’s my hometown after all and a truly amazing city. I even felt hurt when Google added images of Bhopal and Indore cos Lucknow is bigger (and may I say better even though I’ve not been to any of those cities). So imagine my surprise when I installed Google Earth on my new system yesterday morning and noticed that the map of India had a lot of new strips on it, you know, the ones that represent high-res images. Turns out Google did the biggest update ever on 8th June. A lot of Indian cities even the small ones are now available in hi-res.

I was extremely thrilled to finally see Lucknow. I quickly located my home, my school, my college and a lot of other places. I was also surprised to see that the ariel view of Lucknow is a lot better than most Indian cities. There are no big slums or anything and most of the city especially the trans-gomti area (where I live) looks beautiful. It’s heartening to see that large parts of Lucknow are not congested like in big cities. A lot of other cities in UP such as Kanpur, Agra, Bareli, Varanasi, Allahabad, Gorakhpur etc. are also available in high-res. I could even see Mangalore and parts of Mysore.

Coming back to Lucknow, I immediately searched Keyhole Community to see if somebody had uploaded placemarks for Lucknow and I did found one large folder there. But a lot of important places were missing so I decided to do something I had never done. Create a folder of placemarks and upload it. It took me two hours to finally do it. And will take even longer to write a list of all the placemarks and post the KMZ file on the boards.

But all of you can download the KMZ file here. Now I know that most of you may not be interested in it but download the file and watch the places if you have time. Do it for me. You’ll like what you see, I think.

For people who do not use Google Earth, here are a few screenshots of Lucknow.