A great new way of exploring an interesting place

Jun 10, 2010 11:45 GMT  ·  By

Google Street View is great for exploring interesting locations near and far, but the quality of the images isn’t always great. In fact, plenty of times, they’re pretty badly stitched together. One way to get around this is to switch to the User Photos mode available in Street View to see photos from everyday folk of the location and the surroundings.

But this meant you lost the great perspective offered by the Street View images. Well, now,you can have the best of both worlds, user photos can be seamlessly woven into the Google-provided ones thanks to a brand-new feature.

“The new feature places thumbnails of relevant photos on top of the Street View imagery when you click the 'Photos' option at the top right of the panorama,” Daniel Cotting, from the Computer Vision Team at Google Zurich, wrote.

“When you move your mouse cursor over one of these thumbnails, a photo appears which matches the content of the panoramic view. Using the overlays you can quickly preview several photos without changing your viewpoint or losing track of where you were. And if you click on the photo, you enter our interactive photo browser to explore additional pictures taken by the community,” he added.

To enable this feature, just click on the Photos icon that shows up when there are user photos available for the location. This will display a list of the photos up top, like it has always done, but will also add small thumbnails to the panoramic view. Hovering the mouse over the thumbnails reveals the photo over the part of the panorama that it covers.

The image is also skewed in such a way so as to appear as seen from the point of view of the Street View camera rather than from where the photo was actually taken. The results are plenty of times surprising, even seamless, though the images don’t always overlay perfectly. Still, it’s a great new way of exploring the user photos.