Street View: what Google closed, and what it left open

The tour is delivered, the client has signed it off, everyone is happy. Then comes the question, almost always the same one: “and will we be on Google Maps too?”

Five years ago the answer took two minutes and a free app. Today it takes a quarter of an hour of explanation, because Google dismantled most of its contribution apparatus between 2022 and 2024 without ever quite announcing it. Here is what closed, what stayed, and why that disappearance is rather good news for the people who sell the capture.

Three dates, and what they say

The dismantling happened in three moves, over two years. Each looks minor on its own; put end to end, they change the job.

On 1 November 2022, Google announced it was retiring the Street View app. It left the stores on 21 March 2023, taking Photo Paths with it and, above all, the gesture everyone knew: importing a spherical photo from your phone, in three taps.

On 31 December 2024, the Street View Trusted programme closed in turn. The badge, the marketing materials, the dedicated support and the directory of approved photographers were all withdrawn. Tours already published carry on working, but nobody can claim a Google accreditation any more: it no longer exists.

Between the two, nothing was withdrawn on the technical side. Google’s publishing interface is still there, documented and active. It barely evolves any more, but it works.

What Google kept: an interface, not a product

Contribution was not closed, it was moved towards road professionals. You can see it on the very page where Google invites people to contribute: the devices it recommends mount on a vehicle or a helmet, and the tool it puts forward, Street View Studio, is documented for 360 videos.

The logic holds. What Google wants is road coverage: continuous kilometres, routes, frames that follow one another. A video shot through a windscreen produces a thousand an hour. An isolated panorama produces one.

The upshot is that the two remaining official routes are built for two extremes: the Google Maps app for one photo taken on a phone, Studio for a filmed route. In between sits exactly what a drone pilot does: twelve sparse spheres, chosen, taken at forty metres. And for that case, Google has nothing.

Aerial is a blind spot, and blind spots are openings

Nothing forbids publishing a photo taken by drone: the contribution rules do not reserve 360s for ground-level capture, and the same format requirements and content policy apply. It is simply that the whole toolkit assumes you are standing in the street.

You can see it in the details of the interface. Two examples we ran into while building our own publishing, neither of which is written down anywhere.

The first: the heading does not travel through the interface at upload time. Creating a photo ignores the orientation field; the only channel that works is the sphere’s metadata block, inside the file you send. In other words, if your panorama comes out of a stitch that lost its metadata, it will arrive at Google pointing in a random direction, and no upload setting will rescue it. It can be corrected afterwards, but you have to know it needs correcting.

The second: altitude. We chose not to send it at all.

Altitude sent to Google with our panoramas

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Drone EXIF mixes absolute altitude with altitude relative to the take-off point depending on the manufacturer, and sometimes on the firmware. A wrong value is worse than a missing one: it files the photo in a layer where nobody looks for it. We would rather say nothing.

That kind of detail appears in no tutorial, because no tutorial was written for aerial work. The guides available, in English as in French, are adaptations of tripod guides - right down to the advice to paste a logo over the hole at the bottom, when in aerial work it is the zenith that has the hole.

What it changes on a quote

What used to be free and obvious has become work. Work gets billed.

For as long as the app existed, publishing to the map had no commercial value: the client could do it themselves while the kettle boiled. Since 2023, doing it properly for a whole shoot means knowing the format constraints, checking the heading on every sphere, picking the right business listing and knowing what to say when an image is refused.

One precaution, though, and it matters: promise nothing. Google’s review is asynchronous, opaque and final. It can refuse without giving a reason, and remove a photo months after accepting it. A promised timescale is a complaint waiting to happen, and a quantified ranking benefit is a promise none of us can keep.

What can safely be said fits on one line: the panoramas are submitted to Google, and when they go through, they sit on the venue’s listing.

What we did with it

We added publishing to the platform at the end of August 2026, and the framing fits in one sentence: your tour on your own site, your panoramas on the map.

In practice, the views of an aerial virtual tour already carry their coordinates and heading, read on import and correctable by dragging. One button sends the ones that are ready, under the workspace’s own Google account; the tour’s navigation links become the arrows at Google; and unpublishing from the app genuinely deletes the photo over there. The rest - the info cards, the interactive map, the booking button, the analytics - does not travel, and does not need to.

What does travel is the raw master: no nadir logo, no retouching. On the map, a panorama is a document. It is on your own site that it is allowed to be a shop window.

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The loss of the easy path did two things at once: it made publishing more laborious, and it made the people who know how to do it more useful. If you want the detail of the three remaining routes and what each one requires, it is in the guide to uploading 360 photos to Google Maps; and if you want to see what it looks like from inside the tour, it is over here.