Are photospheres being discontinued with street view studio?

After a photowalk today I struggled to upload a few photospheres with the google streetview app. Fair enough, it is being discontinued after all. I follow the in-app directions to use the main map app to upload photospheres, except that doesn’t work in the same way at all.

Instead of being able to gps tag the photospheres like with streetview I can only attack them to already-made locations, and they don’t always seem to show up correctly.

I don’t have an example to give as I didn’t want to leave broken spheres on the map (They almost let you move to them with streetview but seem to snap back?), but unless there is some new way I’m missing I don’t think it’s possible to upload photospheres at gps locations anymore. Any official announcement about this?

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Hi @JonathanCA as you saw the on screen popup announcement in the Street View mobile app , it’s gone away in the specific date next year.

On the current street view mobile app, you are still able to REPOSITION a photosphere to a location, before MARCH month NEXT YEAR .

You can read the last announcement about how to continue shooting Street View :point_down:

https://support.google.com/street-view-trusted/answer/12982376?hl=en

Have Fun on your shooting

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Sorry to sound blunt @OSAMA_1 but that isn’t what the in-app announcement said, as for the link you sent it’s coming up dead for me. In fact, it even says in the app you can still use photo spheres through the normal google maps app. I can provide screenshots of this and links to other articles if you like. It seems like they’ve removed the feature and added no replacement.

Keep in mind this isn’t talking about streetview videos, but static photospheres.

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Upon the announcement in that link I sent, You can set a 360 photos using a Google maps app to only a POIs, but not to drag it to a location like we do via GSV mobile app @JonathanCA

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Hmmm, not sure why I get redirected to the home page from that link then. Odd, but thanks for letting me know. So I suppose that is the end for solo photospheres. Really unfortunate IMO, oh well. Not to mention photopaths as well.

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Once again @JonathanCA

Till March 21 next year, you are able to set a photosphere to a location using the GONE AWAY GSV mobile app. After that date , you will only use the official Google Maps app to only upload a 360 photos to a POIs. There won’t be a use for SV Vids using Google Maps app. To upload Street View Vids, you should use the New Desktop Studio :point_down:

https://support.google.com/street-view-trusted/answer/12176295?hl=en

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I have been searching for a solution for this for a while also and so far I have come up with nothing. Google does mention third party apps for uploading via the API, but I have not seen an implementation that is easy to use so far. I am really bummed as I have taken hundreds of photo spheres with my drone and the StreetView app was the only way to get them on the map. I believe others have liked my photos as I have far more views that I would have ever expected. Hopefully a programmer in the community builds a simple app to position and upload photo spheres.

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It is not clear if the current Street View app will still be able to take photosphere images after March 21 or if “the app is going away” means Google will render it inoperable, like what Apple did to the Halide weather app. I guess we’ll find out in 9 days.

Even though the app currently takes pictures, uploading is already disabled. I uploaded a photosphere last week using Google Maps, as prescribed, and the image is still flat. The good news is my photospheres have over 5 million views total, but at least two of them are missing. Could Google be moving our images to new URLs, or deleting them entirely?

Has anyone found an app that can properly display a photosphere? Facebook partially works but Instagram just shows the flat image.

I have been doing some testing to try to work around the IOS app stopping functioning.

At this time, I use an old version of the Android App on my PC desktop with Bluestacks. This works, but it is not maintained so it has quirks. I hope the functionality will remain after next week…we will see.

My hope is the API for GSV’s back-end remains operable. Some companies use it for their internal tours, like real estate companies or businesses that want to provide views inside their buildings. Hopefully, that same API can be used to somehow add photospheres. Maybe the UL2GSV toolset will be expanded.

As for an alternative, I attempted to use the “google maps” upload and that was a huge mess. You can only add the photo to a “place” and when google adds to that place, it geolocates it to the primary location of the place. For example, I was over a lake about 100m out from the boat landing. I uploaded the same image three times - once to the place for the lake, once to the place for the boat landing, and once using my bluestacks workaround above. The only one that appeared correctly was the GSV app via bluestacks. The other two were WAY off from their actual location. Frustrating.

I am still working on documenting all this and finding a solution over here (github-GoogleMaps360PhotoUpload)- https://github.com/RookieITSec/GoogleMaps360PhotoUpload

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To display photospheres I use Google Photos…but this is more for family/friends. I really hope Google Maps photospheres doesn’t go away because I enjoy looking at other photospheres there.

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Hi Northern,
Thank you for the detailed reply! I’m not looking forward to spending $400+ for an insta360, though I’m sure it will take better (and faster) photosheres than the Street View app. When you uploaded your photospheres, do they display as flat, distorted 360s, or are they displayed so that you can move up, down and around like before? My latest upload from last week (of the Moynihan Train Hall) is flat and distorted.

https://www.google.com/maps/contrib/111767220836847086437/photos/@40.7517137,-73.9957489,3a,75y,90t/data=!3m8!1e2!3m6!1sAF1QipPnNV0BfRpKKG5g8bhROhIXSfgxOVjSZNWoN1Ym!2e10!3e12!6shttps:%2F%2Flh5.googleusercontent.com%2Fp%2FAF1QipPnNV0BfRpKKG5g8bhROhIXSfgxOVjSZNWoN1Ym%3Dw520-h260-k-no!7i4608!8i2304!4m3!8m2!3m1!1e1

Hey, so I have two sources currently for my 360’s - a DJI Mini 2 and an Insta 360 x3, but most of my panos are from my drone. The trick with my panos is to ensure they are in the 2:1 aspect ratio so Google sees them as a pano and places the blue dot.

It sounds like you were using the streetview app for stitching and for uploading. I have not used it to capture the images, but if you take a full series of pano photos with your phone/camera, you could use Hugin to stitch them. I was using the built-in software in my drone to stitch them ,but Hugin does a better job when it comes to quality. You may be able to use parts of my writeup on that here (or follow the links to adapt it to your need) - https://github.com/RookieITSec/HuginPanoScrip

As for my panos, as long as they are formatted correctly, Google shows mine as a pano image. Example - https://goo.gl/maps/HprmQeVJcL4otxS36

To add a bit - my latest panos did show correctly when uploaded through the old Android GSV app using Bluestacks on my PC. Here is one I uploaded recently. - https://goo.gl/maps/KjMNUWHLxzKtQdjY9

It appears that they only take 360 videos for upload now. That removes a lot of user contribution. I wonder why. If anyone finds an answer, please let me know.