Street View imagery API

If you “like what you see” on Google’s Street View you can now access/copy that image via a simple API. Last week Google released a new, free service that allows anybody to add a static image of a Street View to a web page, email to friends for reference, or clients, or else.... Travel and real estate related sites will probably be the first to take advantage of this new service from Google but I am sure creative developers will find many more ways to put that imagery to a good use. Time will show.

Unfortunately, it is not an easy task to “take the snap” exactly how you want it if you don’t know how to work out the heading and the pitch of a Street View. But help is on hand. Keir Clarke from Google Maps Mania has just created a very simple Static Street View Wizard application that automatically generates the URL for a static Street View image. Once you have generated the URL of a static Street View, using the wizard, you can just copy it and add to an image tag in HTML page, etc. To change the width and the height of the image, just adjust manually “size” parameter with relevant values (in pixels), eg. size=600x300 will return image 600px wide and 300px high. Street View images can be returned in any size up to 640 by 640 pixels.



There is a limit of 1,000 unique (different) image requests per viewer per day. However, since this restriction applies to end users/viewers, most developers should not need to worry about exceeding their quota.


Update: alternative Google Street View Generator