If images damage security then they need to talk to satellite companies. The government needs to deal with this issue at the level of satellite companies because they are selling images to us… mapping services etc are available commercially… sometimes free of cost and sometimes for a price. We have never degraded image quality… The images available on Google Earth are also available for purchase from various satellite companies in market. We take security concerns seriously but obscuring images will not help. The short version: “We have not yet decided whether or not to blur some key sites,” according to Andrew McLaughlin, Google’s head of Global Public Policy (is that title a first for a company? How do you get that job?:-) There are a few more quirks to understand if you're a Panoramio user, so do check out the FAQ below for all the details as well as the GEarth Blog for a few more notes about the concerns of Panoramio users.India’s The Economic Times revisits the ongoing saga regarding spots on Google Earth that the Indian government would like to see censored.

If you have linked it, you can grab the data using Takeout, but your photos will also be automatically synced to the new Google Album Archive for free (they won't count against your storage) and to Google Maps if you were using your name to share them (and not your Panoramio username). The Panoramio FAQ page (linked below) details how you can completely export your data from Panoramio if your account isn't linked to Google. The service and the photos will remain online until November 2017, however, so users have plenty of time to migrate their data. Starting that date, no new users will be allowed, and existing users won't be able to add new photos, likes, or comments. That decision was met with some push back from the community, and thus resulted in the delay of the final doom and Google working to implement more social features and contributions in Google Maps to make the Panoramio shutdown more tolerable.Īnd we now have an official word again: November 4, 2016. However, back in 2014, Google had decided to shut down Panoramio and fold it into Maps.

The site launched in 2005 as a way for users to share geotagged photos around the world and was later acquired by Google in 2007. Its Google Earth and Maps layers boast nearly 100 million user-contributed images, with many locations around the globe offering more pictures than what's available from Maps user submissions. Before Street View and PhotoSpheres and Local Guides programs with millions of user-submitted photos, there was Panoramio.

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