Panoramio

Panoramio to Google+

2012-11-29T01:58:00.001-08:00

2 years ago, we launched a feature that allowed all Panoramio users to import their photos from Picasa Web Albums into Panoramio so they could share them with the world via Google Maps and Google Earth. Many Panoramio users are Google+ users, and many Google+ users are Panoramio users. It is for this reason that I am very excited to announce today that we are bringing both worlds a bit closer by allowing Panoramio users to export their photos to Google+ as well.

Why this is so important:

Google+ Local
Photos copied from Panoramio associated to a place will be featured in Google+ Local giving more visibility to the work of creators:

Storage and Data Liberation
Panoramio has unlimited storage for geo-positioned images with a maximum of 25 MBytes or 50 Mpixels per photo. By exporting all your photos to Google+, you will be able to download a security copy of all your photos by visiting the Download your data link under Google Accounts. From there you will be able to download a .zip file with all your photos and albums from Picasa Web Albums.

We will also create a copy of your original photo that will include the modification you make in Panoramio (geo-position, place association, tags and title) so you can keep the content you create in Panoramio offline.

The original image is in the format:
http://www.panoramio.com/photos/original/1000.jpg
The downloadable version of the original with geotags is in the format: http://www.panoramio.com/photos/d/1000.jpg

Google+
Sharing your photos in Google+ will be easier than ever as by uploading your photos in Panoramio, you will automatically upload your photos in Google+, so you can get the best of both worlds. With all these changes we hope to bring you more choice, exposure and freedom for your photos of the World, and we hope you like it as much as we do.

To activate the feature go to www.panoramio.com/settings and for more information about this new feature, please visit Exporting photos to Picasa Web Albums or Google+.

Posted by +Gerard Sanz, Panoramio Community Manager

Panoramio photos in Photo Tours

2012-11-06T23:36:00.000-08:00

Earlier this year we launched photo tours in Google Maps. Photo Tours are made using public user-contributed photos from Picasa Web Albums and Panoramio.

Today we are making it easy, for the Panoramio community to discover which of their Photos are sponsored in photo tours.

To find the photo tours that contain Panoramio photos, check under the Explore tab in Panoramio and click on the option "Photos with tours". That will open a map with all the photos in Panoramio that can start a tour. To open a tour, just select the photo you want to visit from the map, and follow the "Photo Tour" link that you find under the photo. Please note that using photo tours requires Google Maps with WebGL.

We hope you have fun exploring tours. Each of your contributions to Panoramio have made this possible. This is a feature we are extremely excited about, and by making it more accessible, we hope you all enjoy it as much as we do.

Posted by Gerard Sanz, Panoramio Community Manager

Panoramio: A couple of days in maintenance

2012-10-21T22:50:00.002-07:00

We have been working hard during the last months in making Panoramio more stable and reliable for our photo community to continue sharing and enjoying photos of the world.

From today and during a couple of days we need to put Panoramio in read-only mode to make those changes available and it is for this reason that while Panoramio is still accessible, some actions such as uploading a photo will not be available.

The following message will display in Panoramio: "Panoramio is undergoing maintenance. During this time, it is not possible to change any information in Panoramio, such as writing a comment, uploading a photo, or changing your description in the profile"

We expect this to be completed by Thursday, but it may last until Friday when Panoramio will again be fully functional.

While this maintenance tasks are running, we want to thank you for your understanding. Photo processing is not a fast task, so we hope you enjoy these couple of days processing your photos and making them ready for our return.

Update 26th Oct: Maintenance is finished and the site is back to normal state. If there are some problems please report them in this forum post. Many thanks again for the patience while we worked on this maintenance tasks that are needed to keep the site in healthy state.

Posted by Gerard Sanz, Panoramio Community Manager

Putting the Panorama in Panoramio

2012-08-20T09:44:00.000-07:00

Ever since we launched Panoramio people have wondered what was our story around panoramas. Starting today our photo explorer supports flat and spherical panoramas.

Spherical panoramas provide a 360 view of a place. Check this example of the Holocaust Monument taken by M.Reinhardt in Berlin, Germany.

Check also the fantastic view of the glaciers from Gornergrat in Switzerland with this fantastic flat panorama.
You will see a navigation panel on the top left of the photo explorer. Use it to zoom in and out, move around the photo, but do not miss interacting directly with the panorama by panning and zooming directly with your mouse directly on the image.

We worked hard on providing a fast experience for panoramas and high resolution photos. The photo explorer only downloads the portions of the image that are necessary at each moment, so you can start looking at the photo before all the pixels are downloaded. High resolution images are treated in the same way as flat panoramas, and it is for this reason that you will also find the navigation panel in the photo explorer for high-res photos.

There are cameras and mobile phones that stitch photos automatically creating Panoramas, but in many cases software needs to be used to stitch photos together. A tool that we like a lot is Hugin, a Panorama photo stitcher that is easy and free to use.

This is our first iteration of the panorama viewer so we will be happy to hear your thoughts on it in our Forum. For more info on panoramas please check our help content.

We hope you enjoy finding, viewing and creating panoramas in Panoramio.

Posted by +Gerard Sanz, Panoramio Community Manager

Panoramio Contest of May 2012: Love

2012-07-25T06:58:00.002-07:00

The First Prize is for a photo taken by anaturephotographer in Australia.
The Second Prizeis for a photo taken by Shutter in Kuwait.
Honorable Mentions are:

You can see all the winners in the results page for April 2012.

Posted by +Gerard Sanz, Panoramio Community Manager

Panoramio Contest of May 2012: Water flow

2012-07-25T06:55:00.001-07:00

The First Prize is for a photo taken by OSTAJOSEBA in Spain.

The Second Prize is for a photo taken by Ulrich Greger in the Ireland.

Honorable Mentions are:

You can see all the winners in the results page for May 2012.

Posted by +Gerard Sanz, Panoramio Community Manager

Panoramio Contest of May 2012: Motion

2012-07-25T06:55:00.000-07:00

The First Prize is for a photo taken by Brian Rose in Australia.

The Second Prizeis for a photo taken by Mário Eloi Castro in Portugal.

Honorable Mentions are:

You can see all the winners in the results page for May 2012.

Posted by +Gerard Sanz, Panoramio Community Manager

Panoramio Contest of May 2012: Sunset & Sunrise

2012-07-25T06:54:00.002-07:00

The First Prize is for a photo taken by Rita Eberle-Wessner in UAE.
The Second Prizeis for a photo taken by pezzifabio in Maldives.
Honorable Mentions are:
You can see all the winners in the results page for May 2012.

Posted by +Gerard Sanz, Panoramio Community Manager

Let's play!

2012-07-16T07:37:00.000-07:00

The Panoramio team introduced a Panoramio Game in Google Hangouts, on June the 27th, as part of Google IO 2012.
Tomorrow, Tuesday July the 17th at 18:00 GMT+1 (Central Europe Time) +Selen Basol, +Nikolay Zherebtsov and +I will play during 30min from our desks at Google Zurich and we want to invite everyone to join us.

The Panoramio Game lets you compete with your friends to find out where a photo was taken while traveling around the world with Google Maps through stunning Panoramio photos. If you are the best, you get to choose your next destination.
If you want to challenge us, just join our hangout on Wednesday for some fun.

How to join?
We will post an invitation in the Panoramio page in G+, 5min before 18:00h GMT+1 (Central Europe Time). Remember that hangouts only allow 10 users in the same session. Do not be late!

Can not join and want to play later?
Check http://www.panoramio.com/game for the details on the game.

Posted by +Gerard Sanz, Panoramio Community Manager

+1

2012-06-14T07:40:00.000-07:00

Panoramio is full of amazing photos from the most beautiful places of the world. We have added today the +1 button in our Panoramio photo pages. Every time you click on the +1 button in a Panoramio photo you are adding your personal stamp of approval to that photo. You will find your full list of +1’s in a special tab in your public Google profile.

You may as well decide to share your thoughts on a Panoramio photo with your friends, your circles or publicly in Google+. The +1 button allows you to do so. Add a comment, select the audience you want to share it with and off you go.

We hope you find this addition useful both to expand the audience of your own photos in Panoramio and to share your best findings from the millions of amazing photos from our community.

Posted by +Gerard Sanz, Panoramio Community Manager

Panoramio Contest of April 2012: Fun

2012-06-13T06:50:00.002-07:00

I am happy to announce the results of the Fun category for the Panoramio contest of April 2012.
The First Prize is for a photo taken by Grazyna Anna Kondrac… in Italy.
The Second Prize is for a photo taken by photoseeker in the UK.
Honorable Mentions are:

You can see all the winners in the results page for April 2012.
Posted by +Gerard Sanz, Panoramio Community Manager

Panoramio Contest of April 2012: Vertical

2012-06-13T06:50:00.001-07:00

I am happy to announce the results of the Vertical category for the Panoramio contest of April 2012. The First Prize is for a photo taken by Albertszki Tamás in Hungary.
The Second Prizeis for a photo taken by Tommaso Ruggieri in Russia.
Honorable Mentions are:
You can see all the winners in the results page for April 2012.
Posted by +Gerard Sanz, Panoramio Community Manager

Panoramio Contest of April 2012: Green

2012-06-13T06:50:00.000-07:00

I am happy to announce the results of the Green category for the Panoramio contest of April 2011.
The First Prize is for a photo taken by trasgo82 in Spain.
The Second Prizeis for a photo taken by SPetzoldt in Germany.
Honorable Mentions are:
You can see all the winners in the results page for April 2012.
Posted by +Gerard Sanz, Panoramio Community Manager

Panoramio Contest of April 2012: Natural Frame

2012-06-13T06:49:00.000-07:00

I am happy to announce the results of the Natural Frame category for the Panoramio contest of April 2012.
The First Prize is for a photo taken by D.N.Koskinas in Greece.
The Second Prizeis for a photo taken by Patrick de Volpi in South Africa.
Honorable Mentions are:
You can see all the winners in the results page for April 2012.
Posted by +Gerard Sanz, Panoramio Community Manager

Precise mapping with Google Street View

2012-06-12T04:12:00.000-07:00

Brian McClendon, our VP of Engineering for Google Maps and Google Earth, announced last week in The Next Dimension of Google Maps that we have driven over 5 million unique miles in Street View, covering 39 countries and more than 3000 cities.

Today, we are announcing we just made these huge amount of data available in our Panoramio mapping interface to ease the geotagging process of photos for our community. When your photo is mapped close to a place where Street View data is available, you will see in the mapping interface a button called “Precise mapping with Street View”. Click the button to enter Street View mode, or drag and drop Pegman to the place you took the image.

In Street View mode you will see a pin that indicates the photographer position. Drag the pin and drop it to where you stand in the moment you took the photo.
If you start playing with Street View, when you are in Street View mode, you may lose the photographer’s position pin. Do not worry about that, we have added a button that will bring the pin back.

The Panoramio Uploader has been one of our biggest priorities this year:

We have redesigned the photo uploader and the mapping interface from scratch to provide an easy and fast interface to upload and map both your Panoramio and your Google+ imported photos.
We later added the possibility to annotate the subject of the photo and the option to differentiate between indoor and outdoor imagery

Precise mapping with Street View brings us one step forward in our quest to build the perfect photo geotagging interface.

We hope you all enjoy it!
Posted by +Gerard Sanz, Panoramio Community Manager

NPC: May 2012 - Mountains

2012-06-05T06:09:00.000-07:00

NPC as Non Prize Contest is the contest that the Panoramio Community organizes every month.

The May entry was about mountains and I am publishing the results in this post. Entries for June are opened until the 10th and the topic is boating.

Congratulations to these amazing images:

Adjusting the focus

2012-06-05T05:37:00.000-07:00

We have experimented a lot in Panoramio along 2010 and 2011, and thanks to the Panoramio Community we have learned a lot about the geotagging and in general about how a product needs to be shaped to build an amazing community like ours.

We started a strong 2012 with many new features such as the new uploader and a new way to explore photos in Panoramio, and we have a long way to go this year with lots of surprises that we are finalizing to make Panoramio the best geotagging community in the world.

While innovation is important, it is also important to stay focused, and it is with this aim that we are announcing now that we are removing two features from Panoramio that were used infrequently so we can direct our energies to those features that are used the most and to new features that we are developing at the moment.

In the following days, we will take down the iPhone uploader, and geotagging with Google Latitude, and we will keep the experience we gathered while developing those features for future improvements.

Posted by Gerard Sanz, Panoramio Community Manager

Panoramio Contest of March 2012: Symmetry

2012-05-03T18:25:00.003-07:00

I am happy to announce the results of the Symmetry category for the Panoramio contest of March 2012.

The First Prize is for a photo taken by Imre Lakat in Hungary.

The Second Prizeis for a photo taken by ALLWO in Germany.

Honorable Mentions are:

You can see all the winners in the results page for March 2012.
Posted by +Gerard Sanz, Panoramio Community Manager

Panoramio Contest of March 2012: My Town

2012-05-03T18:25:00.002-07:00

I am happy to announce the results of the MyTown category for the Panoramio contest of March 2012.

The First Prize is for a photo taken by Svetlana Peric in Switzerland.

The Second Prize is for a photo taken by Igor MaKou in Spain.

Honorable Mentions are:

You can see all the winners in the results page for March 2012.
Posted by +Gerard Sanz, Panoramio Community Manager

Panoramio Contest of March 2012: Night

2012-05-03T18:25:00.001-07:00

I am happy to announce the results of the Colors category for the Panoramio contest of February 2011.

The Second Prize is for a photo taken by roa006 in Hungary.

Honorable Mentions are:

You can see all the winners in the results page for March 2012.

Update May 10th: The winner of the 1st Prize deleted his Panoramio account so that is deserted.

Posted by +Gerard Sanz, Panoramio Community Manager

Panoramio Contest of March 2012: Reflections

2012-05-03T18:25:00.000-07:00

I am happy to announce the results of the Reflections category for the Panoramio contest of March 2012.

The First Prize is for a photo taken by Vanni Lazzari - VL E… in Italy.

The Second Prizeis for a photo taken by Geraldine Clark in the US.

Honorable Mentions are:

You can see all the winners in the results page for March 2012. Posted by +Gerard Sanz, Panoramio Community Manager

NPC April 2012: Spring Colors

2012-05-03T15:33:00.002-07:00

The Panoramio Community has already published the results of the April Contest: Spring Colors You can now participate in the Mountain Landscapes competition that they are running for May.

The results from the Sping Colors are just amazing and as always they are sponsored in the Panoramio Landing page and here in the blog:
Posted by +Gerard Sanz, Panoramio Community Manager

Panoramio Contest Updated

2012-05-01T04:36:00.002-07:00

Each month Panoramio hosts a contest for the members of our photo community. The aim of the contest is to have fun with the proposed categories and to get a challenge in your photo excursions.

The contest had historically 4 categories, and starting this year we changed the process to offer new categories each month. We have also made some changes in the Site, like the new Landing page, that allow us to sponsor the best photos of the contest directly in Panoramio.

This month we have changed the prizes so the contest is even more attractive. The contest will have 5 runner-up that will have their photos sponsored in the landing page, and a first and a second prize that can win (conditions apply) the following prizes:

First Prize: Sony NEX-7 Interchangeable lens digital camera

Second Prize: Lumix TS3/FT3 waterproof digital camera

We have also done a couple of changes in the Contest Winners page so the best photos from the contest are very nicely displayed!

Check out this month's categories and try your best. You may also want to join the community to decide which photo gets more votes. In that case, visit the voting page and choose the ones you like the most.

Posted by +Gerard Sanz, Panoramio Community Manager

Google Zurich Photowalk

2012-04-28T05:10:00.000-07:00

It is now one week since we hosted together with +Thomas Leuthard and +David Castro the Google Zurich Photowalk. 130 photographers from the Panoramio and G+ photo communities got together to create fantastic content that you can find in the following links:

On G+

#zurichwalk2012

On Panoramio

zurichwalk2012

Google Photo Walk Zürich - City Scape/Stadtansichten

Google Photo Walk Zürich - Motion/Bewegung

Google Photo Walk Zürich - Street Life/Strassenszenen

To spice the walk a bit, we created a small contest and I am now posting here the best 15 images that we picked from the submissions. It was not easy to decide as you could see for the quality of the photos from the event!

Street Life:

City Scape:

Motion:

Check future events at Panoramio Events and join us next time!
Posted by +Gerard Sanz, Panoramio Community Manager

Easily snap your photos to a location in Panoramio

2012-04-20T01:39:00.000-07:00

[Cross-Posted from Google Lat Long Blog]

Earlier this year we improved the uploader tool in Panoramio to make the process faster and more intuitive. Since then, members of the Panoramio photo-sharing community have been simply dragging and dropping their photos to the locations where they were taken, and working together to create a world map of beautiful images.

Today, we’re announcing some improvements to help you even more easily geo-tag your photos in Panoramio. You can now snap your photos to a place on the map. When searching for your photo location, you’ll see a list of suggested places where your photo may have been taken, and you can click “Snap to this place” to select the right location. We’ve also added the ability for users to indicate that a photo was taken indoors. These additional details about where a photo was taken provide all users with more useful information and context.

If you’re not familiar with Panoramio and how it works, get a sense for this powerful user tool by checking out the brief video below. Panoramio is a community site for photos of various places, with the option to share and explore the photos in Google Maps and Google Earth.

Enjoy the improved features in Panoramio and we look forward to seeing more of your photos.

Posted by Gerard Sanz, Panoramio Community Manager