GeoAI needs historical data from space and from the ground, but the latter is lacking. While satellite imagery archives are easily accessible, ground-level imagery archives are largely locked in billions of smartphones. Unlocking this data requires trust:
Trust between your organisation and the people on the ground you will reach to solve your ground-truth data gap problem.
Trust between the people you will reach and their networks, so the number of people reached can grow exponentially.
Trust between your organisation and askphotos.earth:
We are not interested in your data. askphotos.earth's workflow and open-source technology are designed so that we never see your ground-truth data or your prompts.
We are interested in building the technology and the network to support organisations harnessing untapped ground-truth data. If you would like to receive updates, please subscribe to our newsletter.
Thank you for subscribing to the askphotos.earth newsletter.
e.g. Photos of construction sites in Addis Ababa in January 2026
Use this link in step 2 to privately prompt the crowd using the Google Ask Photos AI in their phones.
The right prompt to the right crowd can quickly give you access to a large ground-truth dataset. Unlike a data collection campaign, which can take weeks or months, a data unlocking campaign can be completed within hours.
Open the form template below to create a simple form that includes the generated link and a field to collect the photo album links. Then share your form with your network.
Once you receive the photo album links, download the CSV file from your form responses tab and use the Ground-Truth Data (GTD) Generator to automatically generate spatial analysis-ready data.