To supplement the user-created photos coming from Panoramio

Aug 15, 2009 07:37 GMT  ·  By

Google wanted users to get different perspectives on the photos it delivers with Street View so it started adding images from other sources besides the ones it gathers for the service. It introduced user photos along with the Google ones in Street View earlier this year, although those only came from Panoramio, Google's geolocation-oriented photo sharing site, and now it's announcing it also started featuring photos from Picasa, the other photo-sharing site it owns, geared towards the regular user.

“Millions of people already rely on Picasa Web Albums to share their photographs with friends and the internet community. Now, their public geo-tagged photos will help Google Maps users to get a better impression of a geographic place, especially for areas where we may not have any Panoramio photos,” Daniel Cotting, software engineer, Google Zurich, wrote on Google's Lat Long Blog.

“We've selected these photos by looking for geo-tagged public images in Picasa Web Albums. We apply face detection to screen out images with identifiable individuals and image matching so that we're including the most relevant photographs.”

User-contributed photos were first introduced to provide users with an alternative to the Google photos, which only offer one perspective from one time of the day and are sometimes many months or even years old. The user photos could also show the same landmark from a different angle or with varying degrees of zoom.

The sheer amount of user photos available, especially for famous locations, makes it a daunting task to pick out the best. Luckily, Google applies an automated process to select the best ones. But even so, users navigating Street View may not be able to easily find the photos they want so a new feature was implemented, which suggested the best user-created photo for the current location of the mouse. This recently introduced photo-zoom feature is available for the new Picasa photos as well.