Separate Google and third-party coverage in their dedicated categories

[#1]

Hello,

Currently all different sources are merged together on Google Maps. This mean when enabling the Street View layer both official and third-party blue lines are displayed without any distinction. 

Problem is that there is a huge gap in the quality between Google's pictures and third-party pictures:

- loading third-party pictures is slower, and can often not load at all (notably in applications using the Google Maps API)

- navigating third-party pictures is extremely slow compared to Google pictures where you can make large leaps to move quickly around

- Google had the best cameras, any third-party camera won't give something close in terms of quality, not counting they usually have the camera support (like the car) visible as it is unmasked unlike on Google's pictures

- in some cases the unofficial panoramas are misplaced, leading to errors for applications that rely to good GPS data to work

Here is an extreme example of the quality gap between official and unofficial coverage:

Official: https://goo.gl/maps/JHzeXt3pk66nsbMB9

Unofficial: https://goo.gl/maps/z8yEYPgk4cSEUxGW7

We can all agree the official is way more pleasant to see. Like I said it is an extreme example (bad weather etc), but you'll always see a quality downgrade when using third-party coverage for all the reasons listed above. I obviously don't blame people taking pictures, it's not their fault because no camera available on the market can match Google's cameras, even the ones that cost thousands of dollars (except when taking static pictures for photospheres).

This can be a problem for users that want to look at good pictures and when both data overlaps it is hard to get Google's data (for some unknown reason unofficial will always be preferred, even if official has newer pictures). For API users that try to only get Google's high quality data it is a nightmare. And since the API is a bit expensive, some services have to make users pay to compensate the fees, leading to angry customers not happy to see low quality coverage.

So the idea is to separate Google data in a "official coverage" category, and the third-party data (both photospheres and user-made blue lines) to "unofficial coverage" category. Not only this will allow people to see what the community did all over the World by just displaying the unofficial coverage, but it will also users to only select official high-quality coverage from Google when they want, or for applications through the Maps API. This is a win-win situation for everyone. 

This would result in a setting on Google Maps, for example like this where users can choose to display or hide what they want:

And in the Google Maps API a new setting would be exposed to only select official or unofficial data when calling a Street View panorama. This is very important to have this setting in the API.

This is something very crucial for many users and applications, so I hope this will be implemented in a near future... So please help us by supporting this suggestion! Thank you for reading.

Edit: With the new way to capture imagery using a phone (the new "drive mode" in the Street View app) we now have another kind of data that needs something to be displayed on the map. Obviously it can't be merged with the same blue lines as it is not 360° imagery. This is the perfect time to implement all of this!

[ﺷﻴﮯﺛﺂﺇﻧﻴﮯ]

جميل وقد يكون في معالجة هذا الوضع وفق جودة الجهاز او الحاسب الخاص بهذا التصوير .. احسنت 

[A-H]

Sounds like a good idea. I never understood why Google would prioritize bad quality pictures when there is high resolution pictures taken by themselves. It's great that more areas in the world can be covered by third parties but sometimes it almost feels like some of those pictures are sabotage on Google's work when they "overwrite" the pictures selected in the API.

[Giu_DiB]

Hi @L-C,

I wanted to inform you that I just recovered your idea from the spam folder. Our automatic filters run 24/7 to protect the community from unwanted content and they can be a little harsh at times, Thanks for your patience. 

You can read here some of the reasons why that might have happened: Why was my Connect post marked as spam? 🙂

[L-C]

Hi @Giu_DiB thank you for solving the issue. Not sure what would trigger the filter, I only edited the suggestion once today (first time I edit) to add a note about the new "drive mode" to complete it so maybe it was it. 

[BorrisS]

Hello @L-C

We would like to thank you for your idea, but we did not manage to implement it in time. According to our Idea Exchange policies we are going to close your idea.

Local Guides can still vote and we can come back to this Idea at a later point.