Google Adds More User Photos to Street View
Google is now adding public geotagged Picasa images to Google’s Street View on Maps. According to the Google Lat Long Blog: Millions of people already rely on Picasa Web Albums to share their photographs with friends and the internet community. Now, their public geo-tagged photos will help Google Maps users to get a better impression […]
Greg Sterling on August 14, 2009 at 4:00 pm | Reading time: 1 minute
Google is now adding public geotagged Picasa images to Google’s Street View on Maps. According to the Google Lat Long Blog:
Millions of people already rely on Picasa Web Albums to share their photographs with friends and the internet community. Now, their public geo-tagged photos will help Google Maps users to get a better impression of a geographic place, especially for areas where we may not have any Panoramio photos.
We’ve selected these photos by looking for geo-tagged public images in Picasa Web Albums. We apply face detection to screen out images with identifiable individuals and image matching so that we’re including the most relevant photographs.
This follows the addition of Panoramio images to Street View in February.
With all these geotagged images and “zoom navigation” Google has effectively recreated Microsoft’s Photosynth, which was a really original and terrific technology. But Google has now closed that gap effectively.
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Greg Sterling is a Contributing Editor to Search Engine Land, a member of the programming team for SMX events and the VP, Market Insights at Uberall.