Google Maps has been in the news a lot over the last week or two, having unveiled its own new 3D imagery and offline maps, along with being dumped by Apple as its primary Maps provider (in favor of TomTom).

Google announced today that it has made a “huge amount” of Street View data available in its Panoramio mapping interface. According to Google Maps and Google Earth VP of Engineering, Brian McClendon, Google has driven over 5 million unique miles in Street View, covering 39 countries and over 3,000 cities. All of this data is now available to Panoramio users.

Users will see a button called “Precise mapping with Street View” in the mapping interface when photos are mapped close to a place where Street View data is available. The user can click the button to activate Street View mode or drag/drop “Pegman” to the place the image was taken.

“If you start playing with Street View, when you are in Street View mode, you may lose the photographer’s position pin,” says Panoramio Community Manager Gerard Sanz. “Do not worry about that, we have added a button that will bring the pin back.”

Gerard Sanz 4 hours ago

I normally do not fall into corporate-like speech but I am so excited about this new improvement we just released in our mapping flow, that I could not resist publishing in my personal G+.
I wanted to also thank +Nikolay Zherebtsov for his hard work on this feature and the Street View team for their hard work on collecting the imagery that makes this new feature possible!

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Panoramio: Precise mapping with Google Street View
Brian McClendon, our VP of Engineering for Google Maps and Google Earth, announced last week in The Next Dimension of Google Maps that we have driven over 5 million unique miles in Street View, coveri… 6    7 Powered by socialditto

Google recently redesigned its photo uploader and mapping interface to make it easier to upload and map and Google+ imported photos, and added the ability to annotate the subject of the photo and to differentiate between indoor and outdoor imagery. Last week, Google announced it was shutting down the Panoramio iPhone uploader app and geotagging with Google Latitude feature.

Clearly Google wants Google+ to be an integral part of its photography offerings, across its products.

On a somewhat related note, Google also updated imagery for a number of places around the world this week.