Upload 360 photos to Google Maps: the 2026 guide

Getting a panorama onto Google Maps was straightforward until 2023: a dedicated app, one button, done. Google pulled the Street View app from the stores on 21 March 2023, and the question has been going round drone forums ever since without ever getting an up-to-date answer.

This guide sets out what Google accepts today, through which tools, and what changes when the panoramas come from a drone rather than a tripod. It is written as much for the pilot adding a line to a quote as for the site manager wondering why their aerial virtual tour appears nowhere on the map.

What Google requires of an image

A complete geolocated sphere, in JPEG. There are few constraints, but they are strict: a file that fails any of them is refused with no further explanation.

The minimum for a 360 photo on Google Maps

7.5 MP

Slightly under 4K in equirectangular terms. Every automatically stitched drone panorama clears that bar comfortably; the risk lies elsewhere, in the aspect ratio and the metadata.

Google Maps public documentation, checked on 27 August 2026

The full list fits in five points:

JPEG. No PNG, no TIFF, no raw files.
An exact 2:1 ratio. An equirectangular sphere is twice as wide as it is tall. Even a slight crop breaks the projection and gets the file refused.
7.5 megapixels minimum, with no useful maximum in practice: Google downsizes anything beyond its own ceilings.
The sphere metadata (the XMP block known as GPano). It is how Google knows it is looking at a panorama rather than a very wide photo. An editing tool that “cleans” metadata on export turns your sphere into a flat image.
Coordinates. Without latitude and longitude, the photo has nowhere to go.

The three routes that remain

Google offers two of them, virtual tour platforms offer a third. None is better in the abstract: the right choice mostly depends on how many panoramas you have to publish.

	Google Maps app	Street View Studio	A virtual tour platform
What you send	One photo at a time	Batched files	Every view in a tour
From where	A phone	A browser	A browser
Preparing the file	Yours to do	Yours to do	Usually handled for you
Arrows between panoramas	None	Inferred from the route	Taken from the tour
Attaching to a business listing	The one you publish from	No	Yes
Removing a photo later	In your contributions	In Studio	From the tool
Price	Free	Free	Part of a subscription

Checked on 27 August 2026 against Google's public documentation and the published price lists of the vendors named below.

Route 1: the Google Maps app

This is the official route for a single photo, and it costs nothing. It runs through the contribution tab of the mobile app, which means the file has to be on the phone.

01
Move the stitched panorama onto the phone
This is the step that eats the most time when files weigh 30 or 40 MB each. Use a cable or a network share rather than a messaging app, which would recompress the image and could take the metadata with it.
02
Open the venue's listing in Google Maps
The photo attaches to an existing business listing. If the place has no listing, the photo still lands on the map, but it joins nobody's gallery.
03
Photos, then Add photos
Google recognises the sphere by its metadata and treats it as a panorama. If it treats it as an ordinary photo, that is the sign the XMP block was lost along the way.
04
Check the point on the map
EXIF coordinates place the photo, but an aircraft records the take-off point as readily as the shooting point. A panorama sitting fifty metres off can be corrected, and it is better done straight away.

For one panorama, this route is perfect. For a whole campsite shoot, you repeat the four steps once per viewpoint and still get no arrows between them: on the map, your panoramas stay isolated points.

Route 2: Street View Studio

Studio takes batch uploads, but it was designed for routes. The Google help page that documents it is written for 360 videos, and the contributor page recommends cameras you mount on a vehicle or a helmet.

That is consistent with its purpose: Studio exists to map a street, a trail, a track. It cuts a video into successive frames, lines them up along the route and infers the connections. If you are filming a campsite lane while driving down it, Studio is the tool you want.

It is not the tool for an aerial tour, where the viewpoints are sparse and chosen: six spheres above a golf course do not form a route, and no video links them.

Route 3: from a virtual tour platform

Three vendors sell this feature, on three different commercial models. All of them publish under your Google account, which is the only way it works since Google closed its photographer programme.

GoThru is the oldest and the best equipped for the Google side of the job: connections between panoramas, blurring, level handling. Its model is per-tour - plans at $0, $15, $34 and $75 a month with a published-tour allowance, then $14 per tour beyond it (checked on 27 August 2026 at gothru.co).
CloudPano makes it a headline argument: publishing to Street View sits on the Pro Plus tier, at $33 a month billed annually (checked on 27 August 2026 at cloudpano.com). The Pro tier below it does not include it.
Moorea includes it in the Pilot plan, at €19/month excl. VAT, along with the rest of the platform.

The deciding factor is not the price but what else you publish. GoThru is a Google publishing tool: if that is all you sell, it does the job better than anyone. The other two are virtual tour platforms where the map is one output among several.

The drone case, which ground-level guides skip

Three differences matter, and none of them appears in tripod panorama tutorials.

The first is the zenith. On a panorama shot from the ground, the hole is under your feet, at the nadir, and convention says you paste a logo over it. Under a drone the opposite is true: the hole is above, where the camera cannot reach. On Google Maps that hole stays visible, and you must resist the urge to plug it with a logo: the user-contributed content policy prohibits promotional content, and Google removes what breaches it, with no appeal.

The second is the heading. A panorama stitched on the aircraft carries an orientation that is often approximate. Inside a tour, nobody notices. On a map, an arrow pointing south when the sea is to the north is obvious at a glance: fix the heading before you publish, not after.

The third is the shooting height. A sphere taken at forty metres looks like nothing Google is used to receiving. That is exactly what makes it useful - the whole site, its volumes, its distances - and it is also what makes it unfamiliar to a viewer expecting the street. One well-placed aerial photo beats ten badly spread ones.

Who owns the published photos?

The Google account that published them, and nobody else. This is the most important question in the guide, and the least discussed.

A pilot who publishes a client’s listing under their own account keeps the photos when the client leaves: the client will be able neither to edit nor to remove them. Publishing under the client’s account hands them control for good, including against you. Neither setup is wrong - but arriving at one by default, without thinking, is.

The working rule fits in a sentence: if the tour belongs to the place, the account should too. It is the same reasoning as for the domain name, and it gets settled when the quote is written, not six months later.

And if you would rather not go through Google

There is an open alternative, and it is a serious one. Panoramax was started in 2022 by France’s national mapping agency and the French OpenStreetMap chapter: anyone can contribute geolocated photos, 360 or otherwise, under an open licence.

The project has passed a hundred million photos and nine hundred thousand kilometres of road covered, and a foundation was due to be set up in August 2026 to support its growth beyond France. It is not a substitute for Google in terms of commercial visibility: the audiences are not comparable. It is the right choice when the data has to stay open, reusable and outside a service whose rules change without notice.

The two are not exclusive. Nothing stops you publishing to Google to be seen, and to Panoramax so the data outlives the platform.

Frequently asked questions

Can you publish a photo taken by a drone? Yes. Nothing in Google’s contribution rules reserves 360 photos for ground-level capture; the same format requirements and the same content policy apply.

Do you need a Gmail address? No, any Google account works, including one created on a work address.

How long before the photo appears? Nobody can tell you, and be wary of anyone who does. Review is asynchronous and final: it takes hours or days, it can refuse, and it can remove a photo long after accepting it.

Can a published photo be removed? Yes, from the account that published it - in your Google contributions, in Street View Studio, or from the tool you used to publish, when it offers that.

Does it replace a virtual tour? No. On the map there are panoramas and arrows. In a tour there is navigation by zone, info cards, the interactive map, the booking button and the analytics. The map brings people in, the tour keeps them.

If you already publish aerial tours, the question is not whether to go onto the map but under which account. Settle that one and the rest is just file format. And if you want to see the shortest path between the two, publishing from the tour takes one button.