Google Taps Photos on its Own Picasa for Street View

A while back, Google began including user photos in Google Maps that could be viewed while a user navigated through street view. These photos were drawn from Panoramio.

Google has now decided to add Picasa photos into the mix. This makes perfect sense, considering Google owns Picasa.

"Millions of people already rely on Picasa Web Albums to share their photographs with friends and the internet community," says Daniel Cotting, Software Engineer, Google Zurich. "Now, their public geo-tagged photos will help Google Maps users to get a better impression of a geographic place, especially for areas where we may not have any Panoramio photos."

Google selects Picasa photos by looking for geo-tagged public images. They apply face detection to screen out images with identifiable individuals and image matching so they are including the most relevant pictures.

"The feature is available at major landmarks around the world, in places as different as Paris, Tokyo, and New Zealand," says Cotting. "When you try it out, you’ll discover how easy it is to seamlessly navigate between images from Street View, Panoramio, and now Picasa — particularly with our new photo-zoom feature."

This year, Google also added some new zooming functionalities to Street View. You can read more about that here.