What is the best image quality of 360 photos on street view?

Google Maps tips & tricks
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Hello,

In 2019 I took some 360 photos and uploaded them to Street View. I used a Ricoh Theta Z1. It worked so far, but the quality of the photos was not what I wanted as a photographer.

But hey, I do have a Canon DSLR. So I bought a Nodal Ninja and took my first set of photos with it to create a high-resolution 360 photo. I stitched the photos together (okay, PTGui did it) and exported the new photo, and uploaded it to Street View. But it was rejected. It was a compromise between resolution and file size.

I know 360 photos have to meet some requirements (https://support.google.com/maps/answer/7011737 :disappointed:

  • At least 7.5MP (4K) with a 2:1 aspect ratio.

  • No more than 75 megabytes in size.

So I did some experiments and found out that I can upload a photo with 17000px x 8500px (144.5MP), JPG quality of 95%, and a file size of 39.6MB.
But a photo with 18000px x 9000px (162MP), a JPG quality of 95% and a file size of 44MB gets rejected.

I wonder why the better quality was not accepted because it meets the requirements.

So my question: is there more than just these two requirements that a 360 degree photo must meet? Is there a maximum allowed resolution? Or means the “No more than 75 megabytes in size” in some uncompressed format? And is there a tool or a way to test a photo before I upload it?

Thanks a lot, Ralph

6 Likes
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Hi @dasralph !
Have you by any chance tried to save the photo in Google Photos and then upload from here?
I don’t wish there was a problem with the metadata.

Bye,

David

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I guess the metadata is okay because I was able to upload the small version and both have the same metadata.

@davidhyno What do you mean by “upload from here”? I use the Street View app on my Android phone.

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Try to make an attempt to upload a 360 photo to Maps directly from Google Photos (where you previously saved it) and not from the Street View app!

Let’s see if you can publish it.

Bye,

David

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Hi @dasralph

Since November 2020 the support of Street View Trusted photographers is no longer active on the Local Guides Connect. You can visit the new Street View Trusted help center, where you will receive appropriate guidance from Street view moderators.

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@davidhyno I can’t upload the bigger photo to Google Photos, I get an error message but no hint what’s went wrong :disappointed:

I don’t understand it, the photo is not too big or so.

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@davidhyno It looks that Google Photos was a good hint :slightly_smiling_face:

I can upload photos to Google Photos with a max of 150MP. Maybe this is the same for photos at Street View and it is the same as what I found out with my test.

Thank you, Ralph

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Nice experiment - and understand you want to upload highest quality - but does it make a difference?
I think StreetView downsamples the resolution to something much smaller…

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Hi @dasralph ,

Thanks for reaching out to us!

I just wanted to let you know that I will move your post to our How-tos board, where Local Guides ask questions and express their doubts. More information on Connect’s labels is available here.

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@Reymono I don’t know if Google scales the images down for mobile devices or the desktop website. But for now, I know, that I don’t need to take a gigapixel photo when I can’t upload it.