I usually do edits on a city to map out trails and roads but this aerial imagery is way past old. I am just curious when will OSM be given new aerial imagery for editors?
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That depends on the region and the imagery layers. This cannot be answered “globally”.
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By the way is there an easy way to find out the date of imagery used (in JOSM)? I tried to find out how to do that a while back and failed.
Depends on the imagery layer; for Bing you can find out with a right-click IIRC…
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You mean “show tile info” and “Metadata Capture Date”? Indeed, when zoomed in Paris, New York or Cornwall (I think), it gives a a time window of days. For Latin America, several years :-/.
My understanding is that in general, most organizations don’t “give” OSM imagery to use. Rather, organizations publish their own imagery on their own timelines, and the OSM community attempts to find such sources (that have licensing compatible with the use of mapping OSM data) and collect them together for editors to be able to reference.
The iD editor and some others use a collection called the Editor Layer Index. JOSM uses its own list of sources, though I think some people make an effort to make sure that sources added to one list are usually added to the other.
It may be that your city (or state/regional government, or some other organization) has newer imagery available that just nobody has collected yet into one of the lists that editors use. Or it might be that there really just isn’t any better imagery available for the region you’re mapping in. You might be able to track down what organizations provide the current imagery you’re using and see if their web site mentions any updates being available. (Or even try calling or writing them.) If you post the city and location here, it may be someone else would be willing to do some legwork to see if anything newer was available.
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