Google has introduced a new feature for Street View on Google Maps. This allows users to submit their own photos for places Street View has on display.
This feature turns Street View into more than just a tool to find imagery of places you are looking to go to, but a virtual walkthrough photo gallery of the world. At least it has the potential for that. The places are limited at this point. The following video does a good job of explaining how users can interact with it and view user-submitted photos.
Currently, the feature is available for places like Paris, New York, San Francisco, Rome, Tokyo, Barcelona, Sydney, and New Zealand. There are others, and I would expect the number of places to grow tremendously as time goes on. “Anywhere, really, where Street View is available and where users have contributed lots of high-quality photos; of course, this usually is near famous landmarks but you never know where you’ll discover more to see,” says Frederik Schaffalitzky, Software Engineer at Google Zurich.
Street View is drawing its photos from Panoramio. Users of this service in fact might already have photos in Street View. For the possibility of getting your photos in there, just contribute them to Panoramio and geo-tag them. For popular locations, competition will be stiff though.
