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Comment by gowld | Hacker News Reader

User submitted photos with QR codes?

How would it get into Street View?

Easter egg?

You can submit your own 360⁰ photos to Google Maps and they will appear in Street View. You used to be able to submit whole tours with navigation through the Street View app, but that functionality is now mainly reserved for paid 3rd party services (which have much better software). You could possibly still do this via the API, but I haven't looked that far recently as it would involve building tools that I don't have the time to write.

I'm contributing bicycle trails to Google Street View (and CC-BY-SA to Mapillary). It's no longer done through the app, but through uploading a equirectangular videofile with either gps metadata or attaching a gpx file here: https://streetviewstudio.maps.google.com/

So no 3rd party services needed for plain old Street View. It's a bit opaque what's going on when you upload a video, though, they do all kinds of weird stuff with it. Try to align the track to a nearby road, when I'm not biking that road. Selecting intervals of pictures that doesn't make sense compared to how I would do manually etc. This one could perhaps control better through the API and uploading photo by photo and connect them.

If you don't mind me asking, what kind of camera/setup do you use? How do you find the results? I have been experimenting with this but the equipment I've been using (a mediocre 4k360 camera) gives pretty bad results, and I'm wary of spending a bunch of money and still getting images I'm not satisfied with. I have a bunch of my own street view contributions that were fun to make, but they look nice because they were taken with my phone and I had good control of the process.

A Gopro MAX on a pole on top of my bike helmet. The results raw are pretty OK when I view it locally. It's 5.6k. The problem is often whatever Google decides to do on their end with the video can be a bit funky. So you wont see the same quality as when uploading a photo sphere, but I can cover 40+ km in a ride, which I would never be able to do if I were to manually capture each spot with manual control.

Cool. I've been looking to record a bunch of gravel around where I live (and a bunch of minimum maintenance roads) in addition to the relatively minimal bike-specific infrastructure.

Its not in Street View.

Ah, indeed. Kind of a nothing-burger then if you ask me.

It isn't? But the linked thread shows precisely that, and that is the title...?

Had to look closely at this. This looks like user submitted photospheres which google shows in the street view interface. They show one screenshot of the same spot but from the google streetview car which has no QR codes.

Ah gotcha that is very misleading.

GSV also shows user-submitted photos.. e.g. https://maps.app.goo.gl/wHQ3645j3EkaazC8A

Didn't Google shut down this feature? Last I heard, someone "contributed" a image of the Android robot pissing on the Apple logo, which lead to the feature shutdown.

Didn't know Street View allows this still.

That was Map Maker, which allowed you to actually draw map features (park areas, roads, building outlines, you name it). This is just submitting photos that will be shown in Street View if they are in 360 degrees. Photos are clearly user-submitted unlike map features.

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