Paid Photoscenery:
I bought most of my FSX photoscenery from MegaSceneryEarth and PCAviator and it's been a love hate thing. They sell huge whole country coverage areas that nobody else does at very affordable prices and some areas are absolutely beautiful, but there are often stupid installation or rediculously bad obvious map flaws. And the customer service is virtually nil. But some of the maps are absolutely gorgeous and it's like briefly envisioning Heaven through a telescope while on vacation in hell.
Actually most of the Microsoft FSX experience is a long journey of patching up various rotten eggs throughout the entire damn game. For every hour of flying you will spend five to ten hours fixing FSX. So why not start off with X-Plane?
Some freeware photoscenery links:
France here:
France Photoreal scenery - Freeware Scenery Submissions - OZx Forum. These are very nice tiles. The company FranceVFR has various paid versions which look decent, but the complete autogen map is upwards of $500 and the cheaper maps don't cover the country. YMMV.
Israel/Hungary/Cyprus/Montenegro/Albania/Serbia/Kosovo/Macedonia/Austria/Slovenia here:
FTXDes: POS_Hungary_2005 These are very nice tiles.
Greece here:
FSX Greece sceneries These are nice tiles but the colors look slightly muddy. Don't use the Attiki/Athens autogen buildings as they look like war zone and turn the computer into a slug. You'll have to find all the sections to have contiguous photo landscape but they are all there.
Most of Europe here:
Download photoreal scenery - Italy Photoreal These are lower quality sat tiles but large file size which would need serious tweaking to all match and look contiguous, but they are free offering, and clouds can be turned way up to soften the effect. For myself I just needed a few missing areas not available as payware yet so I placed these lower on the scenery list. You download a separate clickable map which has links to a whole bunch of 1-1.5 GB sections with slow d/l speed. Expect to spend 3-4 days babysitting the computer and write it all down to keep track.
Misc freeware links
FSX & Prepar3D freeware scenery list
https://simcatalog.com/flight-simulator/78-best-freeware-scenery-s-for-fsx-europe.html
FSX - P3D - Rikoooo
https://library.avsim.net/
Try to give back and support these nice people of course.
You can create photoscenery:
I haven't tried it yet, but with all the time spent fixing FSX I havent have time to delve into this fully. Using
Tutorials and
https://www.gimp.org/downloads/ you can go online, download tiles from a server like Google maps or Bing maps, trim them so they're neat(some sellers don't bother and there are horribly sloppy maps out there for sale), and turn them into .bgl scenery files for FSX to use.