March 2, 2011 – woowoowoo

In the wake of my previous post, I was checking out some of the photos on Google maps of Sydney Road, one of my photos came up first, which was nice, but then I started navigating around the nearby photos… they were all crappy photos of a shoe store!

I probably missed this addition, but I’d always thought that photos only came from two sources – Panoramio or geotagged Flickr, which meant that there was a reasonably high quality – a natural filter if you like. Now it seems that a business owner or anyone else who adds photos to a Google Place page, gets them added to the maps interface.

Frankly, that’s crap! At least allow the user to filter them out. I often use this feature to explore an area of interest, I don’t want some retailer’s happy snaps of their shop diluting the experience!

Couple of new things on Google Maps / Street View.

They’ve added some new imagery captured by the trike, Google Earth Blog has a good write up of the additions.

While I was there, I was alerted by user “Munden” that the blue dots of user generated photos had disappeared from the Google Maps when you dragged Pegman. Indeed! That does make it a lot easier to drop pegman on a ‘real’ bit of streetview. You can still access the photos by turning on the photo layer first, then dragging pegman onto a photo. Works OK, but I found it didn’t work in the little inset map that displays in the lower right corner. Maybe that’s on their list!

Google's Street View Trike

Speaking of “on their list”, at the start of May last year, the Google Street View trike visited my uni’s campus, but still no sign of the images online. The LatLong blog seemed to be using the recent additions to trumpet their partner program, but I have to say, if our experience is any guide people will have a looong wait for any results!

Day: March 2, 2011

no google, I don’t like that!

StreetView updates… eventually!