Visit global landmarks with photo tours in Google Maps

Every year, millions of people pack their bags and head to far-off places to enjoy sites and cultures different from their own. While there, they snap photos to document their trip and share their excursions online. Yet none of these individual photos captures the experience of actually being immersed in a specific location. With today’s introduction of photo tours, a feature of Google Maps that guides you through a 3D photo scene, we're one step closer.

Photo tours are available for more than 15,000 popular sites around the world, from famous landmarks such as St. Mark’s Basilica in Italy to scenic treasures like Half Dome in Yosemite. They can be initiated from Google Maps in two ways. First, when you search for a place, such as Trevi Fountain, the results in the left panel will indicate if there is a photo tour available: click either the thumbnail image or the link to start the tour. Alternatively, if you’re browsing the map and click on the label for a particular landmark, the info window that appears will indicate if a photo tour is available.

To produce these photo tours, we use advanced computer vision techniques to create a 3D experience from public, user-contributed Picasa and Panaromio photos. We start by finding clusters of overlapping photos around major landmarks. From the photos, our system derives the 3D shape of each landmark and computes the location and orientation of each photo. Google Maps then selects a path through the best images, and adds 3D transitions to seamlessly guide you from photo to photo as if you’re literally flying around the landmark and viewing it from different perspectives.

Every photo is attributed to its contributor, and the more photos people share, the better the tours get. So if you have great photos of places you’ve visited on Picasa or Panoramio, make them public so they’ll be eligible for inclusion in these photo tours!

Please note that using photo tours requires Google Maps with WebGL. Check out a few of our favorites or visit this map to browse all the available tours. Enjoy touring!

Posted by Steve Seitz, Software Engineer, Google Maps

Easily snap your photos to a location in Panoramio

Earlier this year we improved the uploader tool in Panoramio to make the process faster and more intuitive. Since then, members of the Panoramio photo-sharing community have been simply dragging and dropping their photos to the locations where they were taken, and working together to create a world map of beautiful images.

Today, we’re announcing some improvements to help you even more easily geo-tag your photos in Panoramio. You can now snap your photos to a place on the map. When searching for your photo location, you’ll see a list of suggested places where your photo may have been taken, and you can click “Snap to this place” to select the right location. We’ve also added the ability for users to indicate that a photo was taken indoors. These additional details about where a photo was taken provide all users with more useful information and context.

If you’re not familiar with Panoramio and how it works, get a sense for this powerful user tool by checking out the brief video below. Panoramio is a community site for photos of various places, with the option to share and explore the photos in Google Maps and Google Earth.



Enjoy the improved features in Panoramio and we look forward to seeing more of your photos.

Posted by Gerard Sanz, Panoramio Community Manager

Recap: Google Geo User Summit in Barcelona

Settled between the Catalan Coastal range and Mediterranean sea, the city of Barcelona is home to an array of culinary treasures, iconic architecture, endless museums and beaches, and the impressive FC Barcelona football stadium. The city’s distinctive mix of tradition and innovation thus proved the ideal host to the Google Geo User Summit Barcelona. From October 12th-14th, Google Map Maker, Google SketchUp and Building Maker, and Panoramio welcomed some of our most passionate mappers, 3D modelers and Panoramio photographers across Europe and the Middle East to celebrate their invaluable contributions to an ever-growing Geo Community.

View of Barcelona from Museu Nacional D’art de Catalunya by Matthew Walters, Panoramio contributor

The summit was an exciting opportunity for many of our top contributors to share their geographic crowd-sourced efforts, work directly with Google engineers to brainstorm potential new product features, and set strategies for improving the overall Geo community. Attendees also had a chance to mind-meld with our product leaders during a day of unconference sessions, sharing thoughts, ideas, and stories about their experiences that will help us to improve our products.

Following a keynote address by Aidan Chopra, Google Geo Evangelist, attendees shared their inspiring projects and practices with a rapt audience. We learned from Levan Beruchashvili how the National Agency of Public Registry helped map the entire country of Georgia for its recent graduation to Google Maps. Arek Pawlowski described hosting multiple SketchUp workshops at his university, creating almost 450 models in an ongoing effort to put all of Toruń, Poland into 3D. As it is the user-generated content that fuels the Google Geo products, these and other contributor testimonials stood out as the highlight of the summit.

Attendees at the Google Geo User Summit Barcelona!

To learn more about the Google Geo User Summit Barcelona, visit the event website, where you can browse photographs of the conference and its beautiful setting along the Mediterranean coast. Extensive session notes and user presentations are also available. If you’re interested in attending future events, please see the Map Maker Events Calendar, 3D Events Calendar and Panoramio Events Calendar. This summit was one exciting part of an ongoing celebration of the passionate mappers, modelers, and photo contributors who are improving Google Maps and Google Earth for the world to share. A tremendous thanks to all those who attended and helped make the event a success!

Posted by Lori Savageau, Community Manager, Google Map Maker

Panoramio Groups: Join a photo community to match your interests

Cross-posted on the Panoramio and Official Google blogs.



I'm from Barcelona, and once a year I go to Costa Brava on the Mediterranean with my friends to enjoy good food and nice weather. I always carry my camera with me to capture the beach when the light is just right, take photos of my favorite meals or document my latest hike. When I get home, I upload my photos to Panoramio and position them on the map. Pictures uploaded to Panoramio can be featured in the “Photos” layer of Google Earth and Google Maps, which means that I can share my travel experiences with others and, in return, explore places around the world through the eyes of other photographers.



Starting today, you can share your passions through photographs more collaboratively with Panoramio Groups. This new feature lets you create a sub-community within Panoramio around a topic you’re passionate about, so you can easily engage with like-minded photographers and hobbyists.

Panoramio is an online community of people that share and explore photos of the world.

For example, in my trips around the world, I always take the time to enjoy the local cuisine, like Costa Brava’s arròs negre. So I created a group called “Food,” to give others a "taste" of that region and get a glimpse of what fellow foodies are feasting on. My fellow group members—and by all means I hope you’ll become one of them!—can add their own photos, browse others' and get culinary and travel inspiration.

Panoramio Groups allow members to share photos and start discussions on a given topic.

To share your own interests and passions through photos, hop over to Panoramio and create your own group or join an existing one from the Groups Directory. You can show off your photos of your favorite restaurant, the most beautiful sunset you’ve seen, the latest lighthouse you’ve visited, or the cutest dog from each continent. Whatever it is, try starting a discussion about your favorite topics and share what matters to you with others.



Visit www.panoramio.com/groups to get started. We hope you enjoy this new addition to Panoramio—let us know what you think in the Panoramio Forum!



Posted by Gerard Sanz, Panoramio Community Manager

The View from the Summit: Celebrating Geo Users Across North America

Across the globe, a steadily growing community of passionate users are blazing new trails in the world of online geographic content. With the help of products like Google Map Maker, Google SketchUp and Building Maker, and Panoramio, Geo enthusiasts are harnessing the ability to add and edit various aspects of geography across 180 countries and regions in Google Maps and Google Earth.

To celebrate the valuable contributions of our users, particularly in light of Map Maker’s United States launch in April, we felt it was time to connect with our amazing U.S. Geo Community in person. From July 20th-22nd, the Google Geo team welcomed avid mappers, 3D modelers and Panoramio photo contributors from throughout North America to our Mountain View campus for the first ever United States Geo User Summit.

Brian McClendon addresses a rapt audience of Geo users

The summit was an opportunity for our most active contributing users to come together to learn, teach and share best practices with one another. A Map Maker workshop brought everyone up to speed on solid mapping practices and ways to add that next level of comprehensiveness to the map. Google reviewers also made the trip to Mountain View, CA to connect directly with users and give them the inside scoop on what goes into reviewing an incredible number of mapping edits each day, while offering insight to both new and experienced mappers. The user-generated unconference sessions also gave everyone a chance to troubleshoot, voice ideas, and brainstorm potential new product features with Googlers. There was also plenty of playtime, including an RC Car Scavenger Hunt, which had teams of summit attendees chasing remote controlled toy cars to points of interest across the Google campus. Ultimately, however, the event served as a forum for users to share their amazing and inspiring stories with fellow members of the Geo community.

Geo users mark their place on the map

Hearing their stories and perspectives was definitely the highlight of the summit. For example, Sophia Sallas-Brookwell, an undergraduate at the University of Chicago, introduced her plan to implement Map Maker as a means of addressing the inequitable distribution of healthy food options in Chicago’s South Side. Educator Jon Walker described his extensive use of mapping and 3D modeling in his Gresham, Oregon classroom, and how he encourages his high school students to leave a thoughtful footprint in the world. Many other users also shared their tips, tricks, and motivations, igniting a noticeable enthusiasm among attendees.

Googlers and Geo users join forces on Google’s Mountain View Crittenden Campus

If you weren’t among the crowd at this summer’s U.S. Geo User Summit, feel free to visit the event website, where you can browse photos of featured speakers, brainstorming sessions, and RC toy cars escaping into the sunset. Extensive session notes and presentations are also available. If you’re interested in attending future events, please see the Map Maker Events Calendar, 3D Events Calendar and Panoramio Events Calendar. This summit was just the beginning of an ongoing celebration of the passionate mappers, modelers, and photo contributors around the world.

Posted by Lori Savageau, Community Manager, Google Map Maker

Celebrating top Geo contributors in the Asia Pacific region

In countries like India, Pakistan, the Philippines, and Kazakhstan, a community of passionate users is helping to bring geographic content online—in many cases for the first time. Using products like Google Map Maker, Google SketchUp & Building Maker, and Panoramio, these users are adding geographic information for millions of users to explore in Google Maps and Google Earth.

Recently some of the most active Map Maker mappers, 3D modelers and Panoramio photo contributors from around the region gathered in Singapore to attend the first ever Asia Pacific regional Geo Community Summit.

Map Maker Software Engineer Robin Anil answers questions during a Q & A session.

The summit celebrated top mappers, modelers and photo contributors by asking individuals to tell their stories, brainstorm potential new product features directly with Google engineers during the unconference sessions, as well as make plans for events in the forthcoming year. We learned that India mapper CNR wakes up at 4:30am every morning to map. Pakistan mappers Faraz, Jabran and Omer worked together over the course of two years to map the roads of their country. They even turned Google Calendar into a way to track who was mapping what, and when! Thanks to the efforts of Map Maker contributors throughout the Asia Pacific region, more than a quarter of a billion people now have detailed online maps of the places they live.

Unconference session discussions

To learn more about this recent summit, you check out photos and videos or see detailed session notes and presentations on the event website page. If you’re interested in attending future events, please see the Map Maker Events Calendar, 3D Events Calendar, and Panoramio Events Calendar for upcoming activities. We look forward to celebrating more great achievements from our community of mappers, modelers, and photo contributors in the region.

Posted by Jessica Pfund, Program Manager, Google Map Maker

A new photo browsing experience in Google Earth

Google Earth users love flying around the globe and checking out beautiful photographs in the “Photos” layer. Whether you are a photography fan or simply want to check out images of a place you'd like to visit, we’re pleased to announce a new photo browsing experience in Google Earth. With the new photo cluster feature, you can browse through several photos more easily and quickly.

To start, make sure the “Photos” layer is checked in the left layers panel and zoom down to your area of interest.

As an example below, check out the Golden Gate Bridge in San Francisco, CA. You will see photo icons on top of the satellite images. The larger photo icons indicate larger collections or clusters of photos. Click on any photo icon to open the Photos window.

To browse through the images in a collection, click on a photo in the filmstrip and use the “left” and “right” arrow keys on your keyboard to flip through them quickly.

Whether you’re deciding between Paris, Beijing or Venice for a nice vacation or simply want to go on a quick virtual getaway after a long day, we hope this new way of viewing photos in Google Earth helps bring places around the world to your fingertips.

If you’d like to contribute to our efforts of building a virtual atlas of the real world and have amazing photos you’d like to share, you can do so by uploading them to Panoramio.com.

Happy viewing!

Posted by Wei Luo, Senior GIS Specialist

Geotagging photos with Panoramio and Google Latitude

[Cross-posted from the Panoramio Blog]



It is 9 a.m. and the thermometer shows -15°C. I have a Nexus S with Google Latitude in my left pocket and my new Lumix LX-5 in the right one. I am in Davos and I am ready for a fantastic day of skiing when I decide to use the new feature of Panoramio: geotagging photos with Google Latitude.



Panoramio is a community photos website that enables digital photographers to geo-locate, store and organize their photographs -- and to view those photographs in Google Earth.



Google Latitude allows you to share your location with friends and view their location on a map. When enabled, Google Latitude History allows you to store your previous locations and this allows you to match your photos with the locations stored in Google Latitude History.



By combining Panoramio and Google Latitude your photos get geotagged automatically as the time stamp of the photos is matched with your location record in Google Latitude History. To use this feature you need to explicitly enable it in your Settings page in Panoramio. With your permission, Panoramio will access your Google Latitude History to find out your location at the time when your photos are taken, so make sure the time in your camera is correct and it matches the value you entered in the Panoramio Settings page.



Using Google Latitude while skiing allows you to find your friends when you get lost on the slopes, and at the same time it allows you to focus on taking nice photos not worrying about the location where you are taking them.



Mapping photos within the city is normally not a problem as you can easily remember street names, points of interest, etc. It is much more difficult to do it in the countryside and that is why I decided to give the feature a whirl while skiing in Davos:

Thanks to Google Latitude, my photos were geotagged just after uploading them in Panoramio. The day was great, snow was perfect, weather was amazing and when I arrived home my photos were already geo-positioned.



For more information about this feature please check our help content and as always we will be happy to hear your feedback in the Panoramio forum.

Posted by Gerard Sanz, Panoramio Community Manager

Announcing the Panoramio Photo Contest

The Panoramio community enables you to share your photos and explore them on Google Earth, Google Maps and other places. If you’ve never geo-tagged a photo, watch this video to learn how easy it is to add photos to the Panoramio layer in Google Earth.

Now you can add some excitement to your photo project and enter your photos to the monthly Panoramio Geotagged Photo Contest! Starting this month, we’ll be giving away the new Casio Hybrid-GPS camera EX-H20G to the winner of each category (Scenery, Heritage, Travel and Unusual Location). The Panoramio community reviews all of the submissions and votes for what they consider to be the best each month.


Casio’s new Hybrid-GPS camera combines a GPS engine with autonomic positioning made possible by a motion sensor. This makes geotagging easy—both outdoors and indoors.


If you haven’t joined the Panoramio community yet, try it out and don’t forget to participate in our monthly contest. To enter your photo, click on “Submit to the contest” and choose a category. Good luck and we can’t wait to see your photos!

Posted by Gerard Sanz, Panoramio Community Manager

Panoramio Stats: Where are my photos viewed?

Panoramio is a community photo-sharing site for geo-located images. Photos uploaded to Panoramio show up on its website, as well as other places such as Google Earth and Google Maps.

We’re excited to announce that detailed statistics are now available to users directly within their Panoramio account. Think of Panoramio Stats as a photo-specific version of Google Analytics for Panoramio - in other words, a powerful web analytics tool that helps you measure the performance of your photos. With this new feature, you can track the sites from which your photos have been viewed in visually appealing and intuitive reports.


These statistics are available for every photographer and surface granular information about each photo. For example, a reports for the last 30 days can be broken down by referral domain so photographers can see how many times their photos were viewed within Panoramio, on Google Earth, Google Maps, and through Panoramio’s Widget API.

Additionally, Panoramio Stats helps you identify your most recently viewed and most popular photos, and lets you know about new referral sites so you can track the latest online activity around your photos and figure out what types, styles or genres of your photos generate the most interest and help you improve your craft.

As always we’d love to hear your thoughts on this cool new feature, so feel free to leave us your comments in the Panoramio Forum.

Posted by Gyuri Dorko, Software Engineer

For your viewing pleasure: a new and improved way to explore online photos

When you’re curious about a new place - be it a restaurant that you haven’t yet tried or a popular tourist attraction you’re considering visiting on an upcoming trip - you may find it useful to see what that place looks like in advance. For this reason, Place pages make it possible to visually explore various locations by aggregating and displaying photos from around the web.

Today, we’re offering you a better, more streamlined way to view these photos. With this new feature, you can easily flip through a whole collection of photos and find the sites on the web that have relevant pictures of a given place. Photos that have been uploaded by our Panoramio or Google Places users will appear in high-resolution as an overlay when users click on them. For photos from other sources, you can easily click on a specific photo to see more and visit the site it comes from.



This simple and intuitive online album experience makes it easier to explore all the wonderful photographs of places all over the world. For example, the above photos on the Place page for Coit Tower in San Francisco really help bring the place to life since they’re shot from multiple angles and different times of day, and provide context about this landmark’s location in San Francisco.

If you’re interested in uploading your photos of places and making them more discoverable online, check out Panoramio, a great way to share geo-tagged photos on the Web.

By Sascha Häberling, Software Engineer

Let Pegman guide you to user photos

You may be familiar with the photos layer on Google Maps - it’s a great way to explore user generated photos from countries all over the world right within Google Maps. Over the last couple of years since launching this layer we’ve made various improvements so people can explore them more easily. Like being able to slide from a gorgeous view along the bank of the Seine at dawn to another at sunset, simply by clicking the dots. Today we have another great way you can take that round the world trip you always wanted.

Remember Pegman, the little orange man that you can drag and drop on to the map to jump into Street View images? As of today, he has a new trick up his sleeve. He’s becoming our official photo tour guide, helping you not only navigate our Street View imagery where it’s available, but also helping to highlight the amazing geo-located photos the Panoramio photo community has contributed, as well as public images from Picasa and Flickr. There are images from pretty much every corner of the globe, so there is almost no end of sights and scenes to keep you busy.

When you drag Pegman, you will now see small blue dots to show where user-contributed photos are available (they look a bit like the squares you see on our Wikipedia layer on maps).



If you drag Pegman over one of the blue dots, you get to see a preview of a photo taken at that location.



Then if you drop Pegman onto one of the blue dots, you will be able to view that image in our photo browser, which will let you navigate further into neighbouring pictures.



The photos you can explore this way are the same as those that you can find in the Maps photo layer, giving you a full interactive tour. It’s also a great way to explore images taken from places in out-of-the-way locations - say, the top of Half Dome in Yosemite National Park.



Dragging Pegman onto a photo is another handy way to see all the types of images available in Google Maps. So go ahead and let Pegman be your tourguide to parks, forests, lakes and more.


Posted by Dennis Tell, Software Engineer, Google Zurich

Seeing new sights with photo overlays

Sometimes you want to explore a place for yourself, and sometimes you want to get a sense of how other people experience it. With our newest update to User Photos available within Street View, you can seamlessly do both. Now when you’re browsing a location in Street View, you can see user-contributed photographs directly overlaid within the panorama.


The new feature places thumbnails of relevant photos on top of the Street View imagery when you click the “Photos” option at the top right of the panorama. When you move your mouse cursor over one of these thumbnails, a photo appears which matches the content of the panoramic view. Using the overlays you can quickly preview several photos without changing your viewpoint or losing track of where you were. And if you click on the photo, you enter our interactive photo browser to explore additional pictures taken by the community.

It is now even easier to inspect architectural details and close-up quirks, or see what is happening at a place at more than one time of the day. Start to explore this new world through the eyes of other travelers with some of these locations:

See the Bundesplatz fountains in action

Explore Ponte Vecchio in Florence from a new perspective

See the sun rise over Notre Dame

Posted by Daniel Cotting, Computer Vision Team, Google Zurich

Navigate your way through user photos in Street View

With Street View in Google Maps, you can explore millions of images taken in places across the world. But the photographs you see are based on what the cameras on top of our cars, driving on public roads, can capture (or, in a few cases, what the cameras on our trike or even perched on a snowmobile can capture). That's one reason why we began integrating user photos into Street View last year. User photos allow you to view locations from entirely new perspectives, whether through the eyes of a talented photographer with a knack for capturing architectural detail, or simply taken from locations we couldn't get to. Today, we're making it easier to navigate through these images in a way that should feel similar to how you're used to exploring within Street View.

Let's say you are planning a vacation to Prague and want to get a sense of the area before you go there. You go to Street View and start looking around, finally ending up at the historic plaza where the road ends:

Even though you can't go inside the pedestrian-only plaza with Street View, you can click on the User Photo thumbnail in the upper right corner to enter our photo navigator. That allows you to view a variety of user-submitted photos from Picasa, Panoramio, and Flickr that present a look at some buildings in the plaza:

While navigating through user photos, you'll now notice "orbs" - small silver circles - that hover on and around many user photos. These new click-and-drag controls appear when there are neighboring photos for a location. By clicking or dragging these orbs, you can move to a new nearby photo. Polygons surrounding the zoom orbs show the approximate location of the next image when zooming in:

Clicking the highlighted orb in the middle of the polygon will take you to this picture, which is a closer shot of the buildings covered by the polygon:

Clicking again on the highlighted orb in the user photo above will show you a close-up photo of the details on the building's facade:

You'll find that there are two kinds of orbs: ones that allow you to zoom, and ones along the border of the image that allow you to pan around the location. We wanted to make the experience of navigating user photos more consistent with the smooth Street View experience you know and love, so you can now also drag anywhere in an image to pan. As you click and drag the photo, you'll see the next picture transition into view:

Besides coming from Street View, you can also get to user photos using the Photo Layer in Google Maps (under the 'More' button). For instance, following this this link you can get to a cool view of the plaza from a tower, and then you can easily browse to other photographs also taken from the tower. You should try it out for yourself to really get the feel for this seamless new navigation experience, but here's a short video that will also give you a walk-through of this feature:

Our personal suggestion is that you start at the Sagrada Familia in Barcelona. We hope you enjoy this new way to explore through the impressive array of user photos in Street View!

Posted by Daniel Filip and Daniel Cotting, Computer Vision Team, Google Zürich