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Thursday, February 26, 2009

Photo Fun!

Street View has been given a small makeover: while viewing Street View in Google Maps, there is a border around the Street View window that will turn blue when you hover over the "x".


But the biggest and most exciting change about Street View is a new feature called user photos.

Now, when you view popular Street Views in Barcelona, New York, New Zealand, Rome, San Francisco, Sydney, and Tokyo, a small image thumbnail will appear in the Street View's upper-right corner with the caption "User Photos".


Clicking this icon will adjust the Street View and open the first of a whole set of photos provided by Panoramio users. Panoramio, a service from Google, is a great way to share your geolocated photos. Google has reviewed many of these millions of pictures, and placed them into Street View for your enjoyment.


This new feature can be very useful for Street Views with not-so-good-looking atmosphere, like some taken on dark, cloudy days. User photos, I predict, will soon be popping up all over the Street View world. That would be fun!

3 comments:

Anonymous said...

Saw it and is a VERY neat feature especally right now.

We are very due for another street view update no matter how tiny.

Even if it's just one street.


Hopefully these panoramas will combate Googles sometimes lazyness. They just forget sometimes.

Anonymous said...

I don't think that google has forgotten or gotten lazy at all.
I beleive the "reliable" sources say that street view will be coming to the United Kingdom in spring. I wish they would come out with new content faster and maybe set a schedule to update old content, but we are in the middle of a world-wide recession and busineses are buckling down. I don't see how streetview would be too terribly profitable with them only having advertisements on the side if you type in a bussiness. (If the bussineses pay for it at all I'm not sure.) So i'm sure well see an update in spring, but if there isn't one then I might start getting a little sad.

claudia64 said...

I doubt Google's Street View team is being "lazy."

I'm especially anxious for UK Street View, for example. However, if blog posts are to be believed, a lot of the photos taken in the UK last summer didn't turn out thanks to crummy weather. So, even as recently as a few days ago UK citizens are blogging or posting to blogs photos of the SV car/van seen in their towns.

Sounds to me like Google's trying to get it right and maintain good quality over the images. That's important because some of Google's competition in the street level image market may be small but are uploading very much higher resolution panoramas.

A lot of the US imagery is really low res, so I hope those images are eventually updated to at least match what Google has done with the European images.