Google announced today that it is now letting Panoramio users export their photos to Google+. With Google+ being such a magnet for photographers, and Google touting it as such, it’s kind of hard to believe this wasn’t already an option.
“2 years ago, we launched a feature that allowed all Panoramio users to import their photos from Picasa Web Albums into Panoramio so they could share them with the world via Google Maps and Google Earth,” says Panoramio Community Manager Gerald Sanz. “Many Panoramio users are Google+ users, and many Google+ users are Panoramio users.”
Photos that are copied from Panoramio that are associated with a place will be featured in Google+ Local. As Google notes, this should add a great deal of visibility to the photos.
“Sharing your photos in Google+ will be easier than ever as by uploading your photos in Panoramio, you will automatically upload your photos in Google+, so you can get the best of both worlds,” says Sanz. “With all these changes we hope to bring you more choice, exposure and freedom for your photos of the World, and we hope you like it as much as we do.”
When users export all their photos to Google+, they’ll be able to download security copies via the Download your data link under Google Accounts.
Google announced today that it has added the +1 button to Panoramio photo pages. This is just the latest of Google’s Google+ integration into its other products, which will likely continue for the foreseeable future.
“Every time you click on the +1 button in a Panoramio photo you are adding your personal stamp of approval to that photo. You will find your full list of +1’s in a special tab in your public Google profile,” explains Panoramio Community Manager Gerard Sanz.
“You may as well decide to share your thoughts on a Panoramio photo with your friends, your circles or publicly in Google+,” adds Sanz. “The +1 button allows you to do so. Add a comment, select the audience you want to share it with and off you go.”
In terms of the continued Google+ integration, a source tells us there are some new things happening on the YouTube front that we’ll learn about soon.
The whole Google+ Local thing Google recently announced isn’t going over incredibly well with all businesses, although that seems to be more based on the the integration of Zagat scores (replacing star ratings) than anything directly related to Google+.
Google announced today that it has made a “huge amount” of Street View data available in its Panoramio mapping interface. According to Google Maps and Google Earth VP of Engineering, Brian McClendon, Google has driven over 5 million unique miles in Street View, covering 39 countries and over 3,000 cities. All of this data is now available to Panoramio users.
Users will see a button called “Precise mapping with Street View” in the mapping interface when photos are mapped close to a place where Street View data is available. The user can click the button to activate Street View mode or drag/drop “Pegman” to the place the image was taken.
“If you start playing with Street View, when you are in Street View mode, you may lose the photographer’s position pin,” says Panoramio Community Manager Gerard Sanz. “Do not worry about that, we have added a button that will bring the pin back.”
I normally do not fall into corporate-like speech but I am so excited about this new improvement we just released in our mapping flow, that I could not resist publishing in my personal G+. I wanted to also thank +Nikolay Zherebtsov for his hard work on this feature and the Street View team for their hard work on collecting the imagery that makes this new feature possible!
Google recently redesigned its photo uploader and mapping interface to make it easier to upload and map and Google+ imported photos, and added the ability to annotate the subject of the photo and to differentiate between indoor and outdoor imagery. Last week, Google announced it was shutting down the Panoramio iPhone uploader app and geotagging with Google Latitude feature.
Google announced this morning that it is taking down Panoramio’s iPhone uploader app and geotagging with Google Latitude feature.
Panoramio is the Google service, which lets users upload photos for use in Google Maps and Google Earth layers.
“We have experimented a lot in Panoramio along 2010 and 2011, and thanks to the Panoramio Community we have learned a lot about the geotagging and in general about how a product needs to be shaped to build an amazing community like ours,” says Panoramio community manager Gerard Sanz. “We started a strong 2012 with many new features such as the new uploader and a new way to explore photos in Panoramio, and we have a long way to go this year with lots of surprises that we are finalizing to make Panoramio the best geotagging community in the world.”
“While innovation is important, it is also important to stay focused, and it is with this aim that we are announcing now that we are removing two features from Panoramio that were used infrequently so we can direct our energies to those features that are used the most and to new features that we are developing at the moment,” Sanz adds.
The iPhone uploader was announced in the fall of 2009. At the time, Google deemed the launch the “a first step” toward making it possible to share photos via Google Maps and Google Earth from an iPhone.
The Google Latitude geotagging feature was only launched last year, though it was launched before Google+, which has of course become Google’s “social spine,” as CEO Larry Page says. Google+ also happens to be Google’s photography hub these days, and this is no doubt being taken into consideration here, even if Google+ is not mentioned in the announcement.
I wouldn’t be surprised to see more Google+ integration with Google Maps and Google Earth in the near future.
The “new uploader,” Sanz refers to, already lets you upload photos from Google+ (and Picasa Web albums, which are already integrated with one another) into Panoramio, for use in Google Earth and Google Maps.
If you’re a regular user of Google Maps, you’ve undoubtedly noticed that photos contributed by other Google Maps users are showing up on the map whenever you hunt down a location. In the Map view, they appear as blue dots that you can click on to view the photo (you can also toggle this feature so as to hide the blue dots/photos if you so please); in Street View, they appear as small thumbnails relevant to the locations that the picture is of. Whether the feature delights or vexes you, Google Maps have announced today a fun integration of these user-uploaded photos to create a virtual photo tour of a vast collection of places around the world.
Using images uploaded by users through Picasa and Panoramio, the tours are composed of pictures stitched together to show you various angles and aspects of a location. According to the Lat Long Blog, the photo tours are available for over 15,000 places throughout the world, ranging from the personal mecca of Chicago Cubs fans, Wrigley Field, to Hofbräuhaus in Munich to La Sagrada Familia in Barcelona. Of course, almost all of these photo tours are located either in the continental United States and Central and Western Europe, so don’t get too excited about being able to see “the world.”
If you want to view the map of large areas to see what nearby locations might have a photo tour, you can toggle the appearance of the red dots and balloons that indicate the presence of a photo tour by using the drop-down menu in the upper-right corner of the window and check or uncheck the * option.
More, as you zoom around on different areas of the world, the side-panel on the left side of the screen that lists the available photo tours will automatically update so as to only present tours that are available in the section of the map that you are immediately viewing.
The tours auto-navigate so the amount of wondering around locations is going to be limited, but you can still pause the tour at any time if a particularly captivating image compels you to meditate a little while longer on a particular spot. Also, to take advantage of the tours, you will need to enable MapsGL.
Since 2006, you’ve likely been seeing a steady increase of user photos appear in Google Maps whenever you search for a place, most typically when that place is a location that attracts a lot of camera-wielding tourists e.g., Eiffel Tower, Red Square, Wrigley Field). That personalized (even though you most likely don’t have a personal connection with the person who uploaded the photo) photo-sharing service is all thanks to Panoramio, a Google-owned tool that specializes in publicly geo-tagging your pictures with Google Maps.
If you’re new to Panoramio, check out the demonstration video that will give you a better idea of how the service works.
Like I said, though, if you’ve looked up any popular destination of interest lately on Google Maps or Google Earth, you’ve likely already been seeing Panoramio pictures appearing on your screen. In Street View, they appear as little window panels that you can click on to see the user images stitched together with the Google images. If you’re still in map view, sometimes you’ll see blue dots that indicate a Panoramio-uploaded picture.
Via the Lat Long Blog today, Google Maps announced that they’ve tweaked the uploading process so as to make even easier for users to share their photos on Google Maps. From the post:
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.
The Panoramio pictures you see on Google Maps and Google Earth are, to the chagrin of several users, there whether you like it or not. There is no way to disable or hide the feature. A couple ofdifferent forums in the Google Maps Product Forums have popped up in the last year bemoaning the unavoidable presence of Panoramio pictures on these two Google mapping services. So far, though, no Google employee has responded to the posts and it has not provided a way – as far as I have been able to determine – to hide the Panoramio pictures in either Google Maps or Google Earth.
Given that you can probably expect more Panoramio pictures to be popping up in Google Maps now that it’s that much easier to add them, I asked Google to confirm whether or not there is an option to disable the appearance of Panoramio thumbnails in Google Maps since this seems to be a question people have yet to have answered. I’ve yet to hear a response but we’ll keep you posted if Google gets back to us.
Google Street View is set to take cameras underwater to map Australia’s Great Barrier Reef, in conjunction with The University of Queensland’s Global Change Institute, for a comprehensive study on coral health, dubbed the Catlin Seaview Survey. Also involved are the non-profit organization Underwater Earth and insurance company Catlin.
The Great Barrier Reef is located in the Coral Sea, off the coast of Queensland, and is the world’s largest structure composed of living organisms, able to be viewed from space. The project is meant to study the effects of climate change on the reef, and to provide Google users the chance to virtually explore one of the most biologically diverse spots on the planet, composed of over 2,900 individual reefs, and 900 islands, stretching for over 1,600 miles. The Catlin Coorporation has developed the SVII underwater camera, which takes 360 degree panoramic shots every 4-6 seconds, moving at about 4km/hr.
Here is an awesome look at some Catlin test shots, indicative of what Google and other contributors hope to accomplish in their photographic mapping of the reef. Google also plans to incorporate its Panoramio feature, which geolocates photos for Google Earth and Google Maps.
Project chief scientist Prof Ove Hoegh-Guldberg from the Global Change Institute says that “the visual nature of the project will also help bridge the gap between scientific knowledge and public awareness.” Adding that, “for the first time in history, scientists will have the technology to broadcast the findings and expedition through Google.”
Google has launched a new feature for Panoramio called Panoramio Groups, which lets you create or join a community based on your interests.
“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,” says Panoramio Community Manager Gerard Sanz.
“For example, in my trips around the world, I always take the time to enjoy the local cuisine, like Costa Brava’s arròs negre,” adds Sanz. “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.
There is Groups directory where users can find groups that fit their interests, and if not, create one themselves.
It will be interesting to see if Google integrates this with Google+, as Group photo sharing experiences have been kind of trendy in social media lately, though this is a bit of a different take on that.
Google has released an interesting new feature for its Place Pages, which lets users flip through imagery of the location. The feature draws upon photos from around the web.
Place Pages already showed photos, but now they give the user a new, slicker interface.
"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," explains software engineer Sascha Häberling. "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," adds Häberling.
Users can contribute photos for possible use with the feature, by geo-tagging photos using Google’s Panoramio.
Google Earth, Google Maps, and regular Google search results may sport some more geographically relevant photos in the future. Today, Google announced that it’s linked Panoramio and Picasa in order to make it easier for people to share pictures.
Panoramio is the geolocation-centric photo-sharing site that Google acquired in 2007. Picasa is the more traditional photo-sharing site Google’s owned since 2004. Bringing them together makes sense, even if it’s not the timeliest move Google’s ever made.
As for some specifics, Roger Trias i Sanz, a software engineer at Panoramio, wrote in a post on the LatLong Blog, "[W]e are happy to announce that you can upload your pictures right from Picasa Web Albums into Panoramio. By uploading your best photos of places into Panoramio you can share them with the Panoramio community and the world . . ."
Or you can not share them, of course. Google’s apparently learned some lessons about unauthorized automation since the debut of Buzz, as the post made clear that photos must be both geotagged and in a public album to be transferred from Picasa to Panoramio. Plus, users will have to be logged into a Panoramio account to start an upload.
All in all, this development has the potential to improve several of Google’s products without upsetting anybody.
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