Getting your photographs onto Google Earth & Maps

When you browse a location in Google Earth or Google Maps you may have noticed an option to display photographs taken at that location. Google uses Panoramio for this and if you have photographs taken at your local area or of a spot you have visited why not see if you can get them displayed on Google's maps?



To get your photos onto Google you need to create a Panoramio account (this is mine) and upload some of your images into your account. The site is a bit awkward and doesn't allow for bulk upload but this may be intentional to get you to self-filter your images beforehand.

After you have uploaded an image you then, of course, need to specify where it was taken and you can do this using a mini-map applet or by entering the latitude and longitude information. Apparently some cameras can automatically put the location information in as EXIF but my camera is not that fancy!



You then have to wait. If your image is selected for Google then it will be given a Panoramio logo in your Panoramio account area. It can take several weeks to appear on Google Earth, i've found Maps takes longer and whoever selects images for maps is more selective. If your images are not selected then it is either because they are not of a high enough quality or too small (under 500 x 500px is disqualified) or show people, close-ups of plants, inside buildings et cetera, basically photographs which might be at a location but do not show the location clearly.