Google Sightseeing

Posted on 2005/08/02 06:02:57 (August 2005) by john.

Explore the world without ever leaving your desk!

Thanks to a link on Simon Steele's Blog I have recently discovered the wonderful pastime of Google Sightseeing. There also appears to be a UK Google Sightseeing site. The basic gist of it seems to be to look for landmarks or interesting features using Google Maps' excellent satellite images, and then post them on your blog. That's about it really - simple, but surprisingly fun.

So I've had a go myself - click here to see the results. In a little bit of a break from what seems to be the standard procedure, I've only looked at places that I've actually visited in real life. This means as an added bonus I've been able to augment the "top down" pictures from Google Maps, with my own "bottom up" pictures.

The URL that Google Maps produces for a particular view basically gives you the longitude and latitude for the area you are looking at. Having combined these maps locations with pictures in an adhoc fashion like this has given me an idea for a new "poor man's GPS" feature in Photo Studio - you could essentially add the GPS co-ordinates to your images using Google Maps and a bit of manual search effort.

It wold be great if you could upload your ground-based photos to google, and they could host all of them. You'd be able to zoom into an area, and click "Ground Photos" and see everyone's pics. *That* would be an incredible database!

Posted by Jimmy at 2005/08/09 09:39:37.

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