Virtual Tour/Business Tour on Street View App

[LucianoFiore]

The recent changes on google street view trusted program make possible for local guides to enter the program and transfer photospheres to business owners. This is something that has been known under the name of virtual tour, business view etc but after the recent policy changes there are few points that are still not clear:

Since the street view editor is no longer available to new trusted photographers how do we create floors for business with more than one floor?

Google Maps Indoor looks like a project that hasn't been touched in 3 years but it is advertised on google maps main landing page. Even from there it's impossible to create floors for business view. Also it should be somehow connected to google my business so a shop owner can upload its own floor map, for instance.

When taking multiple photospheres on the street view app the connection on mobile is a rather frustrating job since anytime you touch a photo pin you end up making an unwanted connection. A mobile screen is not a proper place for this kind of task. Also the level of maximum zoom is not enough.

Within Google My business, owners are not able to manage the new virtual tour as it simply doesn't appear. After transferring the photo rights to the business owner how does he manage those pics? What if he wants to delete them and take a new tour after a refurbishment?

[Corrie]

Hi @LucianoFiore, thanks for bringing us your question. I've reached out to the Street View team to get some clarity. 

[MaseD]

I am %100 wondering this too. They really need to make a web api/program to do these such things as add arrows ect... I mapped out a walking trail with 175+ spheres and I cannot connect them as I cannot see where the next one starts/ends to get the arrows correct on the tiny little window at the bottom. Its a Forrest and everything is green! on a 1/2" x 2" wide window I am supposed to be able to tell which way is the right way?

Also about the virtual tours, I have tried to give rights to someone who manages their own google business account and nothing at all!! they said there were no options to enable virtual tour from the pictures I transferred to them and the only option was to "get information on virtual tour" and it kept sending me request to take the pictures.( google automated email )

Its frustrating since I have over 500 spheres and over 1.5million views on google pictures\maps\street view...

I love mapping out places and I eally wish they would do something to fix all of this.

[LucianoFiore]

Thanks for your reply CorrieD, I look forward to some updates on this matter. 

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@CorrieD wrote:

Hi @LucianoFiore, thanks for bringing us your question. I've reached out to the Street View team to get some clarity. 

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[LucianoFiore]

Hi CorrieD,

I transferred some 360 photos to the business owner and the transfer has been accepted but now I would like to modify the connections as they appear to be wrong. Also, since I discovered a photoshop plugin to correct the nadir I would like to re-upload all the pics and build the virtual tour again. How is that possible? From the business owner account there is no way to reverse the process or delete the pictures. Also the pictures appear in a sub-account (business owner has got 10 locations) and google maps keeps pushing to become a local guide for the sub-account. That doesn't make much sense to me. Can we have someone from street view in this forum helping a little bit with those technical issues? Or maybe a proper guidebook to explain everything?

[LucianoFiore]

Hello,

do you have any news about this?

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@CorrieD wrote:

Hi @LucianoFiore, thanks for bringing us your question. I've reached out to the Street View team to get some clarity. 

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[dbateser]

Luciano - You can check out the google maps forum for a series of animated discussions about the challenges of being a newly trusted photographer. There is no great way to create a multi-level virtual tour if you do not have access to the legacy Panorama editor. The experts suggest sending people up stairs, but you still have to superimpose spheres in one floor plane which is more than confusing. According to the Street View Summit in June this legacy editor and "see inside" were being phased out, but this has not happened yet. Therefore, we the newly trusted (via the lowered bar of 50 spheres) are not playing on a level field against the original trusted. Furthermore, new virtual tours published via the mobile app are completely disassociated from the google "my business" dashboard. The best you can do is upload your tour images to the specific business and hope the google algorithm places one of your images in the premium gallery spots (which it appears to do with some regularity). There is no "look inside" tag or any indication that your image is part of a tour which is very unfortunate for you and the business owner. The "look inside" feature was deemed "too confusing" which is a hoot coming from a company that now uses "street view" to mean several completely different things. Meanwhile those with access to the legacy editor can work from the convenience of their desktops while we fuss away creating constellations on our tiny 4.75" x 2.5" screens. Your new tour is also not connected to the street network created by the fleet of google cars the way legacy tours are. There are vague rumors that this will happen eventually behind the scenes, but I wouldn't hold my breath. 

[LucianoFiore]

Hi Daniel,

I believe there is some "politics" behind the way this whole thing is being managed. Professional photographers who have been in the program for a while probably are completely pissed off by this move of opening up to anyone who uploads 50 pics, as they probably feel that it will create an invasion of amateurs taking low quality pictures, creating a competition for what it's probably not even a very rewarding job. They invested in expensive lens and software just to be out passed by people who don't have a clue about photography.

On the other hand all the 360 enthusiasts that took the time to became eligible for the trusted program are not really ready to do virtual tours as a business, unless willing to run into complaints. As already pointed out the connectivity editor is not working very well and there is no desktop version. Moreover when the rights of the photos are transferred to the business owner it becomes impossible to do any kind of amendment to the connections or to upload new pictures.

So even if a newly trusted photographer uses the best gear on the market to produce the pics he/she would not be able to produce a tour of more than 1 floor. And most of the time even on one floor the tour would have wrong connections.

I don't know if Google wants the whole 360 thing to become completely user generated and this is the first move toward, but I start suspecting so.

Professional photographers have little to fear, since there will always be different levels and requirements on the market, and the launch of compact cameras few decades ago didn't kill the photography business. I mean, a luxury hotel won't be happy with a tour taken with an LG anyway. So why they are taking so long at Street View to release a decent tool to manage virtual tours?

Also the new gallery that should be the cherry on the cake, in my humble opinion, is not that great: in a virtual tour taken with their specifications (pic every meter) would create loads of pics even in small spaces, so the gallery would be clogged up with pictures showing unflattering sides of a premise. It would be much better to give the photographer the chance to create areas within the virtual tour and show an appropriate preview/starting view for each of them. 

Let's see what happens

[Sariga]

I had done a 35 connection automatically with Street view app . I had used auto mode since the click was captured automatically and I just uploaded it after two days it connected automatically. 

[IbanV]

It's been little over two years since the original post and little has changed, much to my frustration.  I've only recently started taking 360 pictures, but I've been active as LG for a few years now.  I'm used to uploading my pictures and adding info on my laptop.  I would have expected a tool within Google Maps to connect spheres to create virtual tours on PC.  No such luck! Instead I have to position and connect nodes on a tiny (or at least far from big enough) smartphone screen, which results in messed up tours that need re-editing several times.  This in turn results in extra frustration because edits are not active immediately but take upto 24 hours before you can see the result.  Checking it in preview on a mobile device is no option because the interface is different: the app uses arrows to go in the direction of another picture, while on a PC there's both arrows and position markers (the arrows work when nodes are in the correct position in relation to each other, but for the markers it's essential that the nodes are in the correct geographical position, which is a nightmare to get right in the app).

Google please tell me you have a plan to fix this, because this is not the way to do it 😕