Google is not a company that does things small. So when it partnered with the University of Washington to create the ultimate timelapse it decided to employ one of the largest library's in the world: the internet.
The project was carried out by Ricardo Martin-Brualla, David Gallup, Steve M. Seitz at the University of Washington and -- in partnership with the search giant -- used essentially the internet's holiday snaps to show the world evolving over time.
Unsurprisingly mining the world wide web for images was a big process, one that resulted in them collecting over 86 million pictures from sites such as Flikr, Picasa and more.
Once collected they then itemised each image by date and 'warped' them into the same location for each landmark. They were then stitched together using custom-built software and 'normalised' so that when combined they looked like they'd all been taken by the same camera.
READ MORE:
The results are pretty astonishing when you take into account the fact that each and every image is taken by a different person on a different day over a period of years.
By the end the team had created a number of videos which showed the retreat of glaciers over time, the development of cities and even the stillness of the rainforest.