Your photos in Street View

Street View on Google Maps opened up a whole new world by sharing 360 degree street-level imagery of towns and cities across Australia and in many other countries around the world. Today, we've made it even easier to virtually visit and learn about the world's landmarks.

We've matched popular user-contributed photos from Panoramio to famous locations shown in Street View. In panoramas for which we've identified a photo-match, thumbnails of user photos will appear on the top-right; clicking the thumbnails will display the user photos that match that location.

You can also connect directly to the community behind this great photo content - a link to the author's Panoramio page is shown with every user photo.

Here's how it looks for our beautiful Harbour Bridge:


And for Vlamingh Head lighthouse in Western Australia:


The many Australians who use Google Maps to virtually visit places like Paris to see the famous Eiffel Tower or the Notre Dame cathedral in Street View can now also browse creative user photos taken in the vicinity.

You'll be able to see these places closer up, and see images taken at different times of day, from different angles - showing more about the place than you can see in Street View alone.

The feature is available in many other places too: New York, San Francisco, Rome, Tokyo, Barcelona, and New Zealand, to name a few.

If you're a Panoramio user, you may already have a photo in Street View. If not, it's easy - just publish your best photos and remember to geo-tag them on the map roughly where you took them. Then Google's state-of-the-art image-matching algorithms will analyse them later to see if they're a good match for a Street View location.



Posted by Andrew Foster, Product Manager