You probably know Google Street View
as the 360 view from Google Maps,
where you drop the little peg man onto the blue line,
and up comes a virtual tour the size of, well planet earth.
Street View is a vital tool
to consider as a 360 photographer, since it's connected
to Google. Which is the most popular website on the internet
with more than 2 billion, monthly active users.
And while the majority of the Street View map is covered
by the Google car,
the truth is, anyone can upload 360 photos
to Google Street View and it's actually really easy.
So in this video, you're going to learn step by step,
how to do it, as well as all the basics you need to know
about uploading to Street View.
My target today is this big old bridge, I found
in my backyard.
I noticed that a lot of the existing shots
on the bridge had stitching errors and exposure issues.
So today I'll be taking things into my own hands.
Now, there are a number of ways
of capturing 360 photos for Street View.
The most popular one, is using the Street View app
and taking photos with your phone that turn into something
that looks like a 360 Picasso fainting.
Don't do that.
A better method is using a 360 camera,
that captures the shots in one single click
and stitches them together with near perfection.
Today I'm using the Theta Z1,
however, you can use almost any point
and shoot 360 camera or DSLR setup.
For camera recommendations, check out the countless reviews
and comparisons I've done on my channel.
So traditionally, virtual tours are shot with a 360 camera
and a monopod, where you activate the self timer,
run and hide.
However, the majority of Google Street View
is made up of outdoor shots.
Meaning, it's much riskier using this method outside,
because even with the slightest gust of wind,
it could cause the monopod to blow over and smash the lens.
Ask me how I know?
So while I would recommend using a monopod
if you're shooting indoors,
the majority of the time it will be too risky
to use one outdoors.
So, a safer option is to put your camera on a selfie stick
and hold it above your head.
Using a self-timer will give you time
to move your hands away from the camera
and hide underneath it, as best you can.
Don't worry, it's easy to remove, blur
or cover yourself later.
Always do your best to keep your camera vertical
to avoid unlevel horizons in your shots.
Another problem I had with the previous shots of the bridge,
is that the stunning view of Sydney Harbour was blocked
by this ugly metal fence.
So, this time I held my selfie stick high above my head,
giving my 360 camera a clear of the best city in the world.
Then, I repeated the shot five times,
one on either side of the bridge,
one in the middle, and two in between those.
Now, if you're covering a lot of ground
and getting hundreds of shots,
and I'm talking over a kilometer or a mile,
then shooting on a monopod or stopping every few meters
to take a shot, is going to take for ever.
So, there are two ways to speed up shooting,
when you wanna cover a lot of ground like this.
The first one is switching
into interval mode, AKA, photo time lapse mode,
and setting the interval between two and 10 seconds,
depending on how close you want the shots to be.
If you use this technique, be sure to shoot
with a fast shutter speed, to avoid motion blur.
The second way is shooting 360 video.
So this time, you're obviously shooting video,
instead of photo.
Later on, either you or Google will pick individual frames
from the video every three to five meters,
and link them together to create what is called a blue line,
where the photos are linked together,
and to the rest of the map.
This technique only works for videos shot outside,
and with the GPS switched on.
Now, all three shooting methods can be done directly
in the Street View app, by connecting your camera
to your phone via wifi.
However, this method doesn't allow you any manual control
of the exposure nor any editing ability,
so only shoot this way,
if your objective is quantity over quality.
Also, there are only certain cameras
that are compatible with the Street View app.
I'll link the compatibility page below.
But don't worry, photos
from any 360 camera can still be uploaded manually,
through the app after you've taken them.
Now, how much effort you put into shooting
and editing your shots is completely up to you.
For my Harbour Bridge shots,
I shot in single shot RAW, colour corrected in Lightroom,
stitched and levelled the shots in Rico Stitcher,
removed the noise in Topaz Denoise,
removed the tripod, AKA myself, in Photoshop
and upscaled the quality and resolution in Topaz Gigapixel.
I know that's a long workflow,
and, it really is not a necessary workflow just
for Street View.
So, it's also okay, if you just wanna shoot
and upload without doing any editing.
If you do prefer a shorter workflow like this,
then I would suggest at least using inbuilt HDR mode,
to improve the overall dynamic range of your shots.
There are enough photos on Street View already,
with contrast and exposure issues.
Oops.
But hey, sometimes any photo is better than no photo, right?
Another big factor for editing versus not editing is,
if you're shooting professionally for clients,
or just for fun.
For clients, I'd always advise getting your production value
as high as possible and taking the time
to edit your shots properly.
Now, there are currently four ways of uploading your shots
to Google Street View.
While there's no official desktop software,
you can upload directly from Google Maps
in your desktop browser.
This is quick and easy,
but, only allows you to add photos
to existing business listing and points of interest,
instead of manually placing them
where they belong on the map.
A much better way to upload,
is using the free Street View app
for iOS and Android, which I'll link below.
Some 360 cameras will connect directly
to the Street View app and some won't.
Regardless, all 360 photos can be uploaded manually,
through the app from your phone's camera roll.
Some 360 camera apps also have a Street View upload feature
in-built into them, however it's not super common.
The final way of uploading to Street View is
through a third party virtual tour software,
like GoThru, Panoskin and others.
Say, if you wanted to put an interior virtual tour
of a business, you've already created onto Street View
and connect it with the rest of the map.
Of these four methods,
I'd recommend using the Street View app
for individual photo uploads, and a virtual tour software
for uploading and connecting a larger number of photos
with more precision.
But before we start the upload process,
there are two rules to keep in mind.
The first, is that since Google is such a popular website
and your photos are inevitably going to get a lot of views,
you can't be posting photos of people's faces
or car license plates without their permission.
If those two things incidentally show up in your shots,
then you should blur them out before you publish to Google.
This can be done, both in the Street View app
and using virtual tour software.
The second thing, is that while you don't have to,
you are allowed to patch the Nader,
which means adding a circular graphic at the bottom.
Google allows one patch, top or bottom, covering 25%
or less of the shot.
The only rule is, the graphic must be relevant to the shot.
So, while you couldn't put a McDonald's logo
in some of my Harbour Bridge shots,
you could, if the shots were actually taken
inside an actual McDonald's restaurant.
This graphic can also include
just the photographer's details, including business name,
website and phone number, that's you.
This graphic has the potential to be seen
by hundreds of thousands of people,
and could prove to be a useful marketing tool.
So, feel free to add one if you wish.
Okay, so I've airdropped my five 360 photos to my phone,
and opened up the Google Street View app.
The first thing, we're going to do
is hit the camera icon down the bottom right,
and import 360 photos.
Now, find the shots on your camera roll,
and hit import up the top right.
All right, the photos are ready
and the first thing we're going to do,
is assign a location to them,
so I'm going to select all five.
Now, in this menu, I'm going to go pick a maps listing.
Now, choose your location here at the top,
it's found mine, and that's the Sydney Harbour Bridge.
Now, we have the option to do really basic edits
to these photos, so if you want to, say blur faces,
just tap on the icon and now we can zoom in.
Let's say, we don't want this face to be visible,
all you do to blur a face, is tap and hold,
pick the tick, to add a blur.
There is also an option for Google to do this automatically,
by opening the menu in the top right,
you can choose to detect faces and add blurs.
Now next, what I'm going to do, is tell it specifically
where each of these five points is,
along the Sydney Harbour Bridge.
So, I'm going to choose the first shot here,
and using the menu in the top right,
I'm going to choose edit location.
Now what we have, is the map at the top
and we have our photo down the bottom,
and what we need to do, is align up the two,
so they're in exactly the same point.
And, I can see already that it's done a good job
at finding specifically where I was.
This is the far side of the Harbour Bridge,
and the GPS data was pretty accurate here.
As you can see, when I move the photo down the bottom,
the radar right here changes, and that corresponds
with the direction the photo is oriented.
So you can see here, that this is looking across the Bridge,
and the radar is accurately showing
that it's lined up in the right direction.
If, for any reason this is wrong,
you can adjust the compass down here,
and move the radar in a different direction.
And yeah, I think that is about right.
So now one by one, I'm going to go through these photos
and adjust the compass,
so the red radar is facing the right direction.
I think we're ready, so I'm going to hit publish all,
and my Google account is already connected
to the Google Street View app.
So it already knows that it's uploading these
to my specific account.
Now, I'm hitting publish and there it goes.
We are uploading five, awesome shots to Google maps
and that's it. Within the next day or so,
these five photos will be live on Google.
We can always come back
and edit these in the future, by the way.
If you realise you made a mistake with the location,
or the GPS coordinates,
it's pretty easy to come back and fix it in the app.
Now, using the app is fine
if you have a few individual photos,
like the ones I uploaded here.
However, if you're capturing a really big location
and have a lot of shots, that you also want
to connect to each other, a better option would be using
a dedicated virtual tour software,
that offers batch Street View upload.
There are many options to do this, including Pano2VR,
3DVista, Cupix, Matterport and a few others.
However, the front runners that offer Street View upload
as their primary purpose, are GoThru and Panoskin.
Both platforms are affordable,
and have a ton of great features for creating virtual tours,
and getting them onto Street View quickly and easily.
Both have free trials too, if you want to try
before you buy.
If you do decide to get a paid subscription
to any of these platforms, then cancel in the future.
Your tours will still remain on Street View,
since the photos are uploaded
to your Google account, not just the software,
and will stay in your Google account
until you decide to remove them.
Now, most of these virtual tour platforms have
their own dedicated YouTube channels
with helpful tutorials guiding you
through the entire process.
To find them just search YouTube
for the software you've chosen,
and it shouldn't too long to find them.
If you're still undecided on which software to use,
be sure to check out my
"Which Is The Best Virtual Tour Software" video.
The only thing I'd add to that video is
that, if you think you'll be uploading to Street View a lot,
then I really would recommend GoThru or Panoskin,
since they allow the most amount of customisation
of Street View tours, and also have the best prices
for uploading complete tours to Street View.
I also have a good friend, Street View Eysteinn,
who has a YouTube channel, dedicated entirely
to Google Street View.
So, I'd strongly suggest checking out his videos,
which also cover GoThru and Panoskin
and differences between them.
And, if you wanna learn more about virtual tours
from me personally, I have a video course
that is 12 hours of in depth training,
about the entire process.
It's called Virtual Tour Pro,
and even if you're a beginner with no experience,
uploading your very first shot to Street View,
it'll show you exactly what to do
to become a virtual tour pro, who gets clients
and gets paid for your 360 work.
You can enroll at virtualtourpro.com
or follow the link in the description.
Now, I want to wrap up this video
with a few Street View fun facts.
Fun fact one, what happens if two photos are
in the exact same location on Google maps?
And, this actually did happen
with the photos I took on the Bridge,
since it's obviously such a highly searched
and photographed area.
What happens is they'll both be published,
even if there's only a tiny bit of distance between them.
Street View's behaviour is known to be a bit unpredictable.
However rumour has it, that in some situations,
Google eventually determines which one is the superior photo
based on factors like image quality,
how recently it is and so on.
Fun fact two, can you replace
or remove someone else's photo?
The answer is not really.
While you can add a photo in the exact same spot,
like I mentioned, there's no guarantee it'll replace it.
You can however, report a shot for being poor quality,
breaching privacy or being inaccurate.
However, that's still no guarantee
that Google will actually take action and remove it.
So you may have to reach out to the photographer yourself
and ask them to remove it from their Google account,
and good luck with that.
Fun fact three, can you still become Street View trusted?
Good question.
For many years, Google offered an official title
and badge of being a Street View trusted photographer,
to anyone who successfully published 50 photos
to Google Maps.
While the title didn't really mean anything,
it did give photographers a slight boost in credibility
from using the Street View trusted graphic
in their marketing.
Now at the time of making this video,
the Street View trusted program has been on hold
for a number of months now,
and very little information has been divulged as to why.
Unfortunately, Google aren't very communicative
with their user base, when it comes to Street View
and when the program comes back is anybody's guess.
Rumour has it though, that it will be back soon
or back, in another form.
However, to be honest, I think it's a better idea
to use more effective marketing,
and client acquisition techniques,
and not be overly reliant on the Google badge.
Future clients will never see your badge to begin with,
if you can't grab their attention somehow,
and your marketing techniques will have much more influence
over, winning you over a new client,
than being a Street View, trusted photographer.
If you need ideas about how to pitch and win new clients,
again, this is something I cover in depth
in the Virtual Tour Pro course.
To summarize, Google Street View
is definitely a platform worth using.
Especially, if you're working with it professionally,
due to the high visibility
of Google being a great value add for clients.
If you're using it for fun, like I did here
with my Harbour Bridge shots, that's okay too.
The world needs more quality 360 photos,
and Google offers the best visibility
of any 360 photo platform right now.
And that's it for this video, if you found it useful,
then be sure to hit that subscribe button
for more coming soon.
I'll catch you next time.