14 DAY TRIAL // One of the great features in Google Street View has been the possibility to view user photos of the current location. Street View photos are practical and a great alternative to, well, nothing at all, but their quality generally leaves to be desired. With the user photos feature, you can get much better pics of the more popular locations. So far, the geotagged photos in Street View have come from two sources, both Google-owned products, Panoramio and Picasa. Recently Google has added a third, Flickr, undoubtedly a great addition to the service.
Geobloggers has noticed that Flickr photos have made their way to the selection of user pics for various locations. The integration seems to be widespread as Flickr photos are available for locations around the world. The new photos work just like the ones coming from Panoramio or Picasa, there doesn't seem to be any drawback or limitation indicating that there is some sort of deal between Google and Yahoo, which owns Flickr.
It's not just Street View which gets Flickr photos, the images area available in Google Maps as well, again among the user photos coming from Panoramio and Picasa. Photos show up in Google Maps searches for the interesting locations which have more photos associated with them. You can zoom in on the photos inside Maps and the selection now features Flickr ones as well. The move adds a huge number of images to the Google services as Flickr has over 95 million geotagged photos.
Google hasn't made any announcement, but the full integration and the wide availability likely means that this is a proper launch and not just one of the many tests the company runs for its products. While Google has been known to be a little pushy when it comes to integrating third-party content in its products, Google Books is a prime example, it's likely that there is some sort of official deal with Yahoo.
