14 DAY TRIAL // Google's Place Pages may be informative and useful, but no one would call them 'visually pleasing.' Google's overall design is utilitarian but not necessarily aesthetic. This is what you get from an engineering-driven company. But it's trying to change that, one step being a new overlay display for photos from Google Places.
"Place pages make it possible to visually explore various locations by aggregating and displaying photos from around the web," Sascha Häberling, Software Engineer at Google, wrote.
"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," he announced.
While the full-page overlay is not exactly innovative, similar scripts have been floating around the web for many, many years, it's a step in the right direction for Google.
Users will be able to see large images and browse through the ones available without being distracted by everything else. And they can return to the previous page with a single click.
Google actually offers a similar interface for user photos in Google Street View. While browsing a location you will be able to go to a gallery of user-created photos. These photos, coming from Picasa, Flickr and other sources, are displayed similarly in a full page overlay.
"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," Häberling explained.
This should make it easier and more fun to check out a place you're planning to visit ahead of time. Sometimes a single photo can be more informative than entire paragraphs of descriptions or user reviews.