Google Street View

[Poiponen13]

Which cities and countries you would like to have better Street View coverage? At least Uzbekistan, Germany, Austria and Belarus in my opinion.

[hotdogPi]

Dominican Republic

[Poiponen13]

Bishkek has a quite good coverage. But Bosnia and Herzegovina has poor coverga, as well as Cuba.

[GaryV]

Sucky

[Poiponen13]

Sucky

Souky?

[vdeane]

Not a country, but Les ÃŽles-de-la-Madeleine.

[CNGL-Leudimin]

Which cities and countries you would like to have better Street View coverage? At least Uzbekistan, Germany, Austria and Belarus in my opinion.

Austria already got countrywide coverage a couple years ago, and Germany is set to finally get covered countrywide by mid July.

[zachary_amaryllis]

Lower Wacker Drive, unless that's a problem specific to Earth. I can't seem to get into it from Street View.Or if I do get in, I go to move forward, and end up upstairs.

[LilianaUwU]

Not a country, but Les ÃŽles-de-la-Madeleine.

This. It's insane how GSV can go to Iqaluit but my hometown is off-limits.

[vdeane]

Lower Wacker Drive, unless that's a problem specific to Earth. I can't seem to get into it from Street View.Or if I do get in, I go to move forward, and end up upstairs.

Well, what do you expect from a street named after the Alan of Quindaro? (Incidentally, I just Googled "Alan of Quindaro" to see what would pop up and the first result is some book called Annals of Quindaro by Alan W. Farley... you can't make this stuff up)

More seriously, street view has a huge issue when it comes to multiple roads at different elevations.  It wants to go to whatever it thinks "ground" level is, so bridges and tunnels in particular are difficult.  I use the arrow keys to navigate in such circumstances.

[jakeroot]

More seriously, street view has a huge issue when it comes to multiple roads at different elevations.  It wants to go to whatever it thinks "ground" level is, so bridges and tunnels in particular are difficult.  I use the arrow keys to navigate in such circumstances.

I have this trouble a lot trying to get images of intersections in some parts of Japan. This is Tennoji Station in Osaka...


Street View Around Tennoji Station by Jacob Root, on Flickr

[zachary_amaryllis]

Lower Wacker Drive, unless that's a problem specific to Earth. I can't seem to get into it from Street View.Or if I do get in, I go to move forward, and end up upstairs.

Well, what do you expect from a street named after the Alan of Quindaro? (Incidentally, I just Googled "Alan of Quindaro" to see what would pop up and the first result is some book called Annals of Quindaro by Alan W. Farley... you can't make this stuff up)

More seriously, street view has a huge issue when it comes to multiple roads at different elevations.  It wants to go to whatever it thinks "ground" level is, so bridges and tunnels in particular are difficult.  I use the arrow keys to navigate in such circumstances.

*slaps forehead*
Of course. The arrow keys. In all realness, this literally never occurred to me. Use the arrow keys.

Today I learned.

[Amaury]

I just wish they would go through every area, say, every five years. They finally went through the Tonasket area last month: https://goo.gl/maps/9LjyRbwFQasMYCCw5 Before that, there were only images from 2007 (https://goo.gl/maps/TeKbviwE8RN51oZw8) and 2008 (https://goo.gl/maps/mtu2BTGWjP2irb3X7). Anything from 2009 and earlier was before that capture quality improved. Any area that still has captures from only those years with the terrible quality should be driven through again just for the sake of better quality so you can see what the area is like, especially from those who aren't from the area and are looking to visit the state or community.

[index]

Not a country, but Les ÃŽles-de-la-Madeleine.

This. It's insane how GSV can go to Iqaluit but my hometown is off-limits.

I find it kind of funny how Google has mapped the entire Dalton Highway and Prudhoe Bay on Street View *twice*, but can't even update the 2007-era VHS-quality street view on the hundreds-of-times more popular Ocracoke Island.

Why is the quality of Street View from that era so awful anyway? Google was still a massive company then and the technology to capture decent imagery and post it online had been around well before 2007.

[zachary_amaryllis]

I just wish they would go through every area, say, every five years. They finally went through the Tonasket area last month: https://goo.gl/maps/9LjyRbwFQasMYCCw5 Before that, there were only images from 2007 (https://goo.gl/maps/TeKbviwE8RN51oZw8) and 2008 (https://goo.gl/maps/mtu2BTGWjP2irb3X7). Anything from 2009 and earlier was before that capture quality improved. Any area that still has captures from only those years with the terrible quality should be driven through again just for the sake of better quality so you can see what the area is like, especially from those who aren't from the area and are looking to visit the state or community.

The GSV of my own house, shows a decrepit car (OK it's mine), and has my father (blurred) outside in his bathrobe. Dad died in 2009.

[Georgia Guardrail]

Would like to see more of rural Kentucky mapped. 

Also think it would be cool if Google Street View could do railroads.  After all, you can follow some rivers on Google Maps believe it or not.

[formulanone]

Why is the quality of Street View from that era so awful anyway? Google was still a massive company then and the technology to capture decent imagery and post it online had been around well before 2007.

Here's a rundown of the many GSV cameras (post is from 2019, though).

In short, the technology to continuously take dozens of photos per minute was limited by the camera's abilities for the time. The "write speed" of the cameras' data was also a limiting factor at the time, and probably the massive array of storage for those images was also an early concern, so they probably used a lower image quality to compensate on all fronts. You can see there was a major improvement in imagery somewhere around 2011 and some of the stuff in the last five years is usually quite good, save the stitching errors and distortion.

The exposure triangle of cameras works like this: if you want a fast shutter speed (to prevent blurring), image sensor/film sensitivity (how grainy or noisy the image appears), and a sharp image (so a larger field of vision is in focus), there always has to be something in the equation that is reduced to achieve a balance. Couple that with the constant write-speed and storage limitations in a moving vehicle, and the sacrifices were probably balanced out not for detail, but just to show off that a road and some objects were there. It could also be that the earlier cameras degraded quicker over time due to wear-and-tear, or overheated, and that caused quality issues, too.

Google probably didn't throw all of their chips into that technology, probably as there wasn't an immediate return on investment, but also equipment which would deal with a lot of abuse. The quality was pretty much on par with cell phone photos at the time, and even high-end digital cameras had much more serious limitations 15-20 years ago compared to today. You can pick up what were industry-leading cameras that once retailed for $5000 for a few hundred dollars now, because almost all of the tech either improved greatly or trickled down to lower-end equipment to keep up with competition. Honestly, only camera collectors are into that sort of spending, or someone who just likes that exact model...most of those collectors are onto classic film cameras, anyhow.

[Scott5114]

Of course these days you could brute-force the write speed issue by just having five SD cards and cycling the write operation between them...But solid-state storage was far more expensive back then, too.

[WillWeaverRVA]

Alanland.

[andrepoiy]

For some reason, some parts of Upstate NY have very little Streetview coverage, and I hope that gets rectified.

For example, Ogdensburg, NY only has a few streets covered at all, while across the river in Canada in Prescott ON, every nook and cranny of that town has been covered at least once, and many of the streets a few times. Ogdensburg is bigger than Prescott, mind you.

[jakeroot]

For some reason, some parts of Upstate NY have very little Streetview coverage, and I hope that gets rectified.

For example, Ogdensburg, NY only has a few streets covered at all, while across the river in Canada in Prescott ON, every nook and cranny of that town has been covered at least once, and many of the streets a few times. Ogdensburg is bigger than Prescott, mind you.

Quite a telling image.

I remember back in the "early" days of Street View just how much better Street View coverage was in BC's Lower Mainland, compared to across the border in Northwest WA. Especially the farm roads, rural areas, etc., many streets had missing coverage in WA, whereas in BC it seemed like every road was covered. Really high quality too, as all Canadian imagery is 2009-onward.

In Blaine (Whatcom County, WA, just across from White Rock, BC), many major roads are still missing imagery, whereas across the border in White Rock, there is no apparent missing coverage except very minor roads, mostly driveways. The on-ramp to I-5 Northbound as it leads into the Peace Arch crossing still has no imagery whatsoever, even though the border itself is covered by Street View.

[Max Rockatansky]

Alanland.

New GSV coverage in Quindaro and Pittsburgh Oblast are quite lacking. 

[vdeane]

Northern NY has a lot of sparse street view coverage.  Massena is interesting.  A couple of shopping plazas have full coverage, but the streets are similar to Ogdensburg.  And NY 12 hasn't gotten new imagery between Chippewa Bay and Morristown since 2008.

[CoreySamson]

Alanland.

New GSV coverage in Quindaro and Pittsburgh Oblast are quite lacking.

The real travesty is how much blurry 2008-era coverage is still the newest coverage in much of Camargo Oblast. It makes T-Mobile's 5G coverage of Nebraska look plentiful.

[Poiponen13]

In Finland, coverage is mostly good, except in the north. And other countries I would like to see in Street View are Bosnia-Herzegovina, Moldova, Afghanistan, China and Somalia.