Panoramic Images of the World

Broadway and Battery Place Surge

ptr.watts@gmail.com (peterwatts) — Fri, 06 Nov 2009 10:07:00 +0000

Yesterday saw a sudden surge in the number of people wanting information about Broadway and Battery Place in New York. Suddenly, from the usual trickle, hundreds of people were viewing the page data, mostly wanting to know where it is and how to get there.

360 panorama of Broadway and Battery Place, New York. © Peter Watts

We are intrigued, and can only guess that there may have been a fireworks display or some such held there. If anyone can shed any light on it we'd love to know!

Success of Image Tags

ptr.watts@gmail.com (peterwatts) — Sat, 15 Aug 2009 06:51:00 +0000

A month ago Panoramic Earth introduced Tags for panoramic images. A month on the success of this has become clear with:

Several thousand specific 'tag' pages being viewed
66% of 'tag' page views coming from search engine results
High percentage of visitors following links to specific locations

Some of the most viewed tag pages:

england ¦ greater london ¦ australia ¦ beach ¦ cave ¦ hawaii ¦ vatican

This shows the usefulness of image tags in promoting the panoramic images on the site. Tags are added by the photographer as they upload the images and are therefore very specific and targetted - make use of them!

Panoramic Earth Joins Twitter

ptr.watts@gmail.com (peterwatts) — Wed, 12 Aug 2009 18:04:00 +0000

Panoramic Earth on Twitter: We have recently joined Twitter, come follow us there. Both posts from this blog and new images added to Panoramic Earth will be tweeted.

Feedmil - The New Feed Search Engine

ptr.watts@gmail.com (peterwatts) — Mon, 29 Jun 2009 10:55:00 +0000

Site promotion is always an important issue. The net never stands still and it can be hard to keep up with new tools. One such tool Panoramic Earth is now using is Feedmil, a feed search engine. Feedmil provides topic-focused feeds for all types of medial like blogs, microblogs, public and social media feeds as well as podcasts. It is set up to help people search feeds of interest efficiently and quickly through simple interfaces backed by innovative technologies.

Submitting a feed is done through a simple form. Feedmil also pro-actively hunts out feeds for itself and then contacts feed producers to submit a description of it.

For Users, the Feedmil interface allows you to specify both the search query and also the popularity range of feeds. Making full potential of the 'Long Tail', users can quickly discover high quality, less popular feeds for subjects of interest. Slider controls adjust the search for topic relevance giving more accurate results while allowing you to explore the feeds you like serendipitously.

Feedmil was founded in 2008 by a web scientist and 3 enthusiastic search engineers. It is currently a privately funded startup, aiming to become 'the best feed search engine in the world'.

Panoramas from High Places

ptr.watts@gmail.com (peterwatts) — Sun, 07 Jun 2009 17:50:00 +0000

Often the best viewpoints over cities and the like is at the top of monuments. This poses particular challenges as taking a 360° image from a single point on the monument will probably result in a lot of blank wall, and only a partial view of the potential view. Panoramic Earth has a new contributor, Richard Herring, who specializes in taking a series of images that, when put together, give the impression of hanging in mid air, as if the monument or tower from which the images were taken did not exist. He says the following:

'I'm a part-time traveller and occasional photographer, with a particular interest in SE Asia. As I hope my contributed panoramas show, I enjoy the challenge of taking panoramas from high places like towers and monuments, where even if there were space and time to set up a tripod, 180 degrees of the image would be of blank walls and tourists. Under those circumstances, there's no alternative to a steady hand and a good deal of luck (and often a good deal of manual post-processing.) But it's worth the effort, even if the results are sometimes technically flawed, to get a spectacular view that couldn't be achieved any other way.'

These results can be clearly seen in 360 panoramas constructed from series of photos taken from the top of the from the Petřin Tower in Prague, the Monument in London and the Wat Si Saket image from Bankgok (compare with this Golden Mount image taken without moving around the platform and shows the chedi on the top).

For those trying this kind of image it is useful to consider the following:

Imagine that the point of rotation is the center of the tower.
Remember to keep the camera as steady as possible
Shoot in portrait mode and keep the center of the image on the horizon.
From each photographic point take an image directly ahead of the center of the tower.
Then take a couple more facing slightly to the right and the left.
Try to do this at as many points as possible round the tower, but at least at the middle of each side and corner if possible (giving at least 8 points the images are taken from). This provides quite a bit of overlap between the groups which helps when it comes to stitching.
Use image stitching software, like Hugin (free) or PTGui (paid) to compose the shot.

As Richard shows, the results can be very good. Other examples of this kind of picture on Panoramic Earth include:

A composite of the San Francisco skyline taken from the Coit Tower.
View over Stanford University from the Hoover Tower in California.
View of Oxford from St Mary's Church Tower.

Panoramas of London in the Snow

ptr.watts@gmail.com (peterwatts) — Mon, 02 Feb 2009 22:07:00 +0000

The 2nd February 2009 saw some of the heaviest snowfalls in London for many years. Much of the city closed down, public transport was severely affected and for a time London's airports closed. As a result, London was much quieter than normal as the landscape was transformed into something magical.

Some panoramic images from the day were added to Panoramic Earth, mostly taken from Regents Park.

Season Greetings and 2008 Achievements

ptr.watts@gmail.com (peterwatts) — Wed, 24 Dec 2008 13:13:00 +0000

Merry Christmas to one and all. 2008 has been an exciting year for Panoramic Earth, with thousands of 360 panoramas from all over the world added to the site. Here are some of the year's highlights:

Growth to over 3400 panoramas, with new images being added on a near-daily basis
360 panoramas from over 40 countries on every continent bar Antartica (though we'd love to see some from there - anybody?)
Over 35 contributing panoramic photographers
Use of the tours as embedded content in over 100 other places on the internet
Incorporation of the Google Earth plugin allowing users to view the images linked to Google Earth from their own browser
About 400,000 visitors during 2008

Next year looks to equally exciting as Panoramic Earth grows to become one of the largest collections of cylindrical panoramas on the planet. We intend to introduce a forum for our users and photographers, as well a special directory for panoramic photographers and resources. Hopefully, by the end of 2009 we will have over 7,000 images.

So, Merry Christmas and a Happy New Year from a content editorial team looking forward to a break!

Panoramic Earth meets Google Earth

ptr.watts@gmail.com (peterwatts) — Mon, 22 Dec 2008 15:49:00 +0000

Google recently launched a Google Earth plugin API allowing Google Earth data to be viewed in websites in much the same way as the Google Maps data can be used. Panoramic Earth has added this to the viewing options for the panoramas in the site. Thus it is now possible to view the panoramas liked to the Google Earth view in addition to the map, satellite and terrain views previously available. Simply slelct 'Earth' from the Map tab to activate. You may need to download the plugin for this to work. Below is a screenshot of a Brooklyn Bridge panorama from New York in the Google Earth view. A couple of cautionary notes though, the Google Earth plugin is very memory hungry and the geplugin.exe process does not stop when you change back to another view, but keeps collecting data as other map views are moved around. It is also not stopped if that tab / window using it is closed, but the browser is still running. It can, of course, be ended in the Task Manager. Interestingly, the Google Earth plugin is not supported by Google's Chrome browser.

Panoramas from Australia's Red Centre

ptr.watts@gmail.com (peterwatts) — Tue, 16 Dec 2008 10:17:00 +0000

Panoramic photographer Klaus Mayer has been busy again, and there are now over 25 panoramas from Australia's Red Centre on Panoramic Earth. The panoramas cover sights in the vibrant town Alice Springs, surrounding major tourist attractions and remote outback destinations.

The images can be found on the Northern Territory or Alice Springs panorama index. Klaus enjoys traveling around the outback and remote areas of Australia when he has the time, and this collection is sure to grow in the future. To date, the sites covered around Alice Springs include Uluru (aka Ayers Rock), Kata Tjuta (aka Olgas), Kings Canyon in Watarrka National Park, Hermannsburg and outback destinations like Chambers Pillar, Henbury Meteorite Craters and Palm Valley in Finke Gorge National Park.

Klaus' latest image from the Albert Namatjira Monument brings the total number of panoramas on Panoramic Earth to near 3400.

Panoramic Earth hits 3200 Panoramas

ptr.watts@gmail.com (peterwatts) — Thu, 27 Nov 2008 17:01:00 +0000

Panoramic Earth has just passed a landmark of 3200 fully interactive 360 panoramas from all around the world. With recent added pictures from the very northern areas of New Zealand, including around Cape Reinga, and other parts of Northland, this global guide continues to grow. Pictures from Australia, especially from around Victoria and South Australia, are also regularly added to the site and the number of contributing panoramic photographers has also grown. As always, these beautiful panoramas are linked to Google maps and are accompanied with local descriptions.

Panoramic Earth continues to make these tours available to other websites to use as embedded content. So, if running a virtual tour from parts of New Zealand, Australia or any other featured place in the world is of interest to you, then check out the site's Use a Tour page. Below is an example tour based around Doubtless Bay, a rugged and beautiful part of Northland in New Zealand.

This tour of Doubtless Bay requires iframes. If you cannot see the tour then please go to the &amp;amp;amp;amp;amp;amp;lt;a href="http://www.panoramicearth.com/3465/New Zealand/Doubtless_Bay"&amp;amp;amp;amp;amp;amp;gt;Doubtless Bay page on Panoramic Earth&amp;amp;amp;amp;amp;amp;lt;/a&amp;amp;amp;amp;amp;amp;gt;.

New York Guide and Map

ptr.watts@gmail.com (peterwatts) — Thu, 27 Nov 2008 09:30:00 +0000

With over 100 panoramas of New York providing an interactive guide to the city, Panoramic Earth continues to expand it's coverage of the USA. New York is one of the most visited travel destinations in the US, and a major entry point for visitors from Europe. Hundreds of thousands of people travel here from Europe every year for the shopping, eating and world famous sights. Panoramic Earth's guide and map of New York covers many of the well known sights, as well as parts of the city not so frequently promoted to tourists.

Each panorama is linked to a Google Map of New York and accompanied with some local and travel information. This allows you to see where you are, what is there and how to get there in one easy, interactive step. For a full list of the New York 360° panoramas available see the New York Panorama Index on Panoramic Earth. As with the other tours on the site, this New York guide can be embedded within 3rd party sites. See the Use a Tour page for more information.

Google Chrome Slow Takeup

ptr.watts@gmail.com (peterwatts) — Thu, 06 Nov 2008 09:28:00 +0000

Since it's launch earlier this year it seems that, even with the huge power of Google to promote things, the take up of Google's own browser, Google Chrome, has been quite slow. Panoramic Earth has seen the use of Chrome grow to only 0.67% of it's visitors in the last few months. In addition to this the browser seems to sometimes have problems loading up Google maps at first, though this is resolved when the page is refreshed.

Most of the comments thus far on the web about Google Chrome come from Fire Fox users who have taken a look. They seem pretty unanimous in agreeing that it is a faster browser and, while taking more memory to run when first open, does not suffer from memory bloat like other browsers. However, they also seem pretty unanimous in thier disapointment that there is, to date, little in the way of Add-ons that make Fire Fox so popular among it's users. Most often noted are those like Ad-Block Plus and Informenter. Therefore it seems that unless and until Google Chrome encourages the use and development by such add-ons by the wider community then this browser is not going to see wide uptake in the near future.

Obi Baby & Child Carrier

ptr.watts@gmail.com (peterwatts) — Mon, 22 Sep 2008 16:38:00 +0000

When hiking around to get to locations you see many different ways people deal with children. A new baby and child carrier is quite innovative. Unlike back pack style baby carriers, the Obi Baby & Child Carrier folds up small enough to fit in a large pocket. It comes in a small pouch which can be attached to a belt. This means that it is only on your back for the time you actually need it - when your child or toddler has run out of energy. For the rest of the time your back is free from any load.

Obi Bay and Child Carrier Website

The Obi Baby Carriers are suitable for children between about 1 year and 3 years, depending on child size. The come in several styles and colours, black, cream, and yellow. The carrier is made from strong cotton webbing, which is durable, washable and comfortable to wear.

Beaches of the World

ptr.watts@gmail.com (peterwatts) — Mon, 15 Sep 2008 11:59:00 +0000

If you are looking for some beautiful pictures of beaches around the world then Panoramic Earth is a place to come. Here you will find over 200 panoramas of beaches from all over the world, each linked to Google maps allowing you to see where it is and how to get there. The beach panoramas are also accompanied with some local and travel information and there are often other panoramas taken nearby of local attractions, hotels or places of interest.

2700 Panoramas

ptr.watts@gmail.com (peterwatts) — Wed, 27 Aug 2008 22:00:00 +0000

Panoramic Earth now has 2700 panoramas from all over the earth. The latest image, submitted by Robin Wilson, is a beautiful 360 panorama from Tolsta Bay, an isolated by on the Isles of Lewis, one of the Western Isles, and part of the Outer Hebrides off the west coast of Scotland.

Robin has spent a lot of time photographing this part of Scotland, and his panoramas reflect the care and dedication he has to this part of the world. This picture is stunning, capturing dramatic storm clouds over the island to the south with a massive double rainbow hanging over the beach. To the north, the sun is shining once again, clearly visible over the still ocean in late afternoon.

Find and View Recent Panoramas with Ease

ptr.watts@gmail.com (peterwatts) — Wed, 27 Aug 2008 21:40:00 +0000

Today we made some changes to Panoramic Earth which will make viewing the recent panoramas added to the site easier to find and follow. On the homepage there are now links to the recent images, displaying them as either a list of recent panoramas or as thumbnail previews of the pictures. These links are found at the top of the 8 most recent panoramas shown on the homepage (the link here will take you to our thumbnail previews):

One will take you to a Photo View table with thumbnails of the images and, unlike before, you can easily browse back through the site additions right to the very first panoramas (from London):

You can easily select the List View, which will just show the titles of the latest pictures:

Links from both will take you to the specific page showing the panorama linked to it's Google map, or to the wider geographical region in which the picture was taken. This should make exploring the world through Panoramic Earth a little easier.

Panoramas from Adelaide

ptr.watts@gmail.com (peterwatts) — Fri, 01 Aug 2008 09:43:00 +0000

There are now over 50 panoramas from Adelaide on Panoramic Earth. This is the main city of South Victoria in Australia and shows images from both central Adelaide and some of the surrounding beaches (such as Glenelg Beach).

The list of images on the site can be found either in the Adelaide panorama index, which lists the images by category, or by an Adelaide panorama search, which lists all images alphabetically.

Improved Search Result Presentation

ptr.watts@gmail.com (peterwatts) — Sat, 26 Jul 2008 22:09:00 +0000

Searches for panoramas on Panoramic Earth has just got smarter as we have just implemented changes that make these more useful. Instead of a simple A-Z list of the search returns, these are now tabulated in a more meaningful way as shown below:

You get -

Panorama ID - a site ID given to each panorama
Location Name - An active link which will take you to the location listed
Region and Country Listing - Shows you where in the world the location is found at a glance.

The search covers more than just the location title. For example, a search for 'victoria' will return both panorama locations with 'Victoria' in the title and also images from Victoria in Australia and other places where Victoria relevant to the search request.

This is much more useful than the old way of presenting search results as shown above.

Reaching Critical Mass?

ptr.watts@gmail.com (peterwatts) — Tue, 15 Jul 2008 15:51:00 +0000

We are finding increasingly that images added to Panoramic Earth are becoming rapidly indexed by Google and also found in the searches. Panoramas of the Temple of Ten Thousand Buddhas, one of the tourist attractions in Hong Kong, was found position 9 and 10 within Google within 24 hours using general search terms relevant to it. Of course, that might all have changed now. For the current status of this page within Google follow this 10000 Buddha Temple search

June top 10 Panoramas

ptr.watts@gmail.com (peterwatts) — Fri, 04 Jul 2008 11:52:00 +0000

It is always interesting to see what are the most viewed panoramas over time. Here are the list of the top 10 most viewed images on Panoramic Earth during June 2008. What would be even more interesting is to know why some of them are so popular:

They range from holiday destinations in Mallorca through to beaches in Hawaii, and from galleries and architecture to the tops of Swiss mountains. We have to see if the trend changes during July.

10,000 Search Terms and the Google Dance

ptr.watts@gmail.com (peterwatts) — Wed, 18 Jun 2008 09:29:00 +0000

Web life is full of surprises, and none so more unpleasant as a sudden and unexplained dramatic drop in web traffic to a site. About a week ago, we saw a 90% drop in traffic from Google searches coming to Panoramic Earth (see Google traffic graph above). This was unexpected and caused quite a stir. Had we inadvertently broken a new rule and so been penalized? Had Google changing it's algorithm, thus changing the rules? One thing that was obvious from the flurry of related postings to various forums was that we were not alone.

And a week later, again for no apparent reason, things returned to normal. They say a week is a long time in politics - well it sure is a long time on the net when this kind of thing happens.

33 Countries in 6 Continents

ptr.watts@gmail.com (peterwatts) — Fri, 13 Jun 2008 16:02:00 +0000

With the recent addition of a panorama from the Sidama Savannah in Ethiopia by Richard Greenall, Panoramic Earth now features 360 panoramas from 6 continents. The only one missing currently is Antarctica, and putting up a white image claiming it to be from the South Pole during a snow storm would be cheating.

Similarly, the addition of pictures from Trinity College in Dublin by Matthew Walters adds Ireland to the list of featured countries, bringing the current number to 33. That is now over 2100 panoramas from 33 countries over 6 continents. From mountain tops to caves, jungle to desert, and fields to cities. It is a tribute to the enthusiasm of photographers in many different places, and we want to thank all those who have chosen to display their images on the site to date.

2100 Panoramas

ptr.watts@gmail.com (peterwatts) — Tue, 10 Jun 2008 17:52:00 +0000

Panoramic Earth now has over 2100 panoramas from around the world. Panoramic image 2100 shows the Steam Vents at the Kilauea Caldera at the Hawai'i Volcanoes National Park on Hawaii Island (also known as 'Big Island'), bringing the total number of panoramas from the State of Hawaii to 108.

The global collection of 360° panoramic pictures continues to grow at about 6 panoramas a day from all over the world, so it will not be long before we have to report on image 2200.

Feeds Feed Sties

ptr.watts@gmail.com (peterwatts) — Tue, 10 Jun 2008 09:47:00 +0000

Sometimes it is interesting to see where the RSS site feed ends up. Recently we came across two sites that incorporate and show the our feed of new panoramas as part of their own site. Good news all round really, and another example of how the net weaves in and out to link various parts together. So if you do not have a feed reader, then let these sites do the feeding for you and just look at the panoramas that they put up. Two such sites are in the RSS Feed Directory and on Photopress which show the new panoramic images and the descriptions, with, of course, links back to the photographer and the page in Panoramic Earth where the image can be viewed with a world map and more information.