Streetview scraper v1: cheap, arbitrary sized streetview images | Hacker News Reader

Streetview scraper v1: cheap, arbitrary sized streetview images

loichovon.com

67 pointsefishnc10 comments

The risk of getting banned by Google seems pretty catastrophic, so I’d be pretty worried about using this. Even if you use a “burner” Google account, who knows what they could do to link it to your primary account.

no issues yet. I'll update the post if I get in trouble :D

I'm surprised this unauthorized method uses the API at all. Years ago I animated a route with streetview images using crude browser animation and screenshots.

It looks like the V2 [0] is using the web client. Since it is injecting additional JS code in the page, it can/could easily be detected by google.

[0] https://loichovon.com/posts/streetview-scraper-v2.html

Say more? I don't understand the technique youre describing and its objective.

I automated clicking the Streetview arrow in a browser and taking a screenshot of a defined region of the screen to create a type of Streetview Hyperlapse. Many other tools have done it better since, at least as far back as 2013: https://tllabs.io/google-street-view-hyperlapse-youtube-vide...

Ahh I see, those hyperlapses look very cool!!

Going back to your first comment, I originally made this as part of an app with an interactive streetview component. I reused the initialization code I had as the base for this. Re-using that code also makes sure the screenshots taken would be close as what you'd see using the embedded streetview (In our project we had a bunch of remote locations without a lot of SV images, so depending on the search radius used when querying for a panorama, we could end up in vastly different places).

However, I realize that I never even considered scraping the public site, which would allow for hiding your identity by not needing an API key. I'll think about this.

Why does this have a cost?

You can get street view images from maps.google.com for free, so a scraper should be able to use the same interface for free (as long as it's either not throttled, or you can get multiple IPs or don't care about speed).

This project uses the Panorama API. A traditional scraper will quickly run into recaptchas when scraping a Google property.

As @mplewis said, because it uses the SV API - however, I've since found a way to reduce that cost to practically 0. See https://loichovon.com/posts/streetview-scraper-v2.html

As you say though, another way to go about this would be to scrape the public SV site, which I have not attempted to do. @xnx linked this project in another comment, which seems to do just that: https://tllabs.io/google-street-view-hyperlapse-youtube-vide...

I don't know if/how they evade captchas.

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