This is part of a series of posts expanding on our Google Earth Blog FAQ.
We get quite a lot of email along the lines of: “Our business / rental property / property for sale is shown in Street View when it was under construction / being renovated and we feel this is negatively impacting us. Please update the Street View.” Google, however, does not capture Street View on demand and for good reason – they would be inundated with requests. But there is nothing stopping you from adding your own pictures to Google Maps and Google Earth and in most situations they will be treated with a greater priority than Street View imagery.
If you already have some good photos of the location, you can easily add them with Google Maps. Simply open the location in the Google Maps side panel either by searching for it or clicking on the place marker. Next, click ‘Add a Photo’ which appears both in the sidebar and as the last item in the list of photos. You can then upload your photo. Google Maps then shows a notice saying your photo will soon be available to be seen by the public. We assume that there is some sort of verification process to ensure that unsuitable photos are not displayed.
We found that you cannot add photos by this method to locations that do not already have markers.
Select a marker on the map (1) and then click ‘Add a Photo’ (either (2) or (3)
An alternative method is to use a smart phone and Google’s Street View app (Android iPhone). This will allow you to take panoramic photos and upload them to Street View with ease. Be sure to turn on your GPS for proper georeferencing. We believe that photos uploaded this way do not need to be attached to a placemark.
For more advanced options see this page from Google which also includes this interesting YouTube video, which has some interesting information about the trekker and how Street View is captured with it.
About Timothy Whitehead
Timothy has been using Google Earth since 2004 when it was still called Keyhole before it was renamed Google Earth in 2005 and has been a huge fan ever since. He is a programmer working for Red Wing Aerobatx and lives in Cape Town, South Africa.
We used to use http://www.panoramio.com/help/photos_google_earth but they stopped showing up eventually on Google Earth.
So now my friends say to try “Mapillary | Crowdsourced Street Photos”
https://www.mapillary.com/
Have you seen that photographs added by the method above, are not correctly located? They seem to be located only by the ‘title / named location’ position. Which means if you attached a photo to ‘Grand Canyon National Park’ they are just in the general area, not actually in the spot where the photo was taken. Very very annoying. And it’s makes the process somewhat useless if pics are just dumped in a certain spot.
Also; how can you edit locations on the computer? Using the street view app (no computer version yet?!) seems to be a stone age step backward compared to the gallery & exact locations from panoramio / google maps / earth.
Strange steps from Google.
Yes, I have been trying it myself and am not happy with it. I need to experiment more to find out the best way.
Good luck. I’ve given up and will wait for some years till they figure it out.
The old panoramio site had automatic geolocated images, tags and a nice paragraph where one could give a detailed description of the image.
When they finally shutter the site, I imagine google images will lose a lot of photographs that were described well in panoramio. They’ve had years to shutter it, but the alternative is a half-hearted attempt – with little or poor map / earth relationship (gps data) and very poor captioning ability. A very strange move.