Google has been shooting interior photos for businesses that applied

Oct 27, 2011 08:45 GMT  ·  By

Google has been working on getting every street and every place on Earth photographed and part of Street View and Google Maps. But it's not nearly done, it's got the outside covered and is now moving inside.

Google has been photographing store interiors for a few months now and has started debuting those images on Google Maps.

People have been spotting interior images for a few places and it looks like Google is adding more, though it hasn't made any big announcement.

The project is dubbed Business Photos and aims to make it easier for folks to visit stores, restaurants and other places from home, before they decide to actually go there or to find out if they have certain products, scope the perfect table and so on.

Even though images for several businesses have now been added, the only way to get to those shots is via the business' Place Page, there's no indication on Google Maps itself that imagery is available.

That will probably change as more places go live. When Google has enough images for the product to make sense for most people, it will probably make a big announcement and also make these images easier to discover.

Google debuted the program a few months back and since businesses in the cities where the program is available have been able to apply and have their place visited by a team of Google photographers.

The program is available to cities in the US, Australia, New Zealand, Japan, France and the UK, though only in their capital cities for the latter, Paris and London.

It seems that Google now has enough data to start publishing it. It could still be a while until much of the photos gathered until now are stitched together to create 360 degree panoramas and are published.