Panoramio

» see panoramio.com as it lived, on the wayback machine

~ the obit ~

i ran google earth in 2007. panoramio was the layer of geotagged photos that sat on top of it, little blue squares scattered across mountains and city blocks, and clicking one opened a photograph somebody had uploaded with gps coordinates attached. i used the photos. i did not upload any. panoramio was a community for photographers who carried gps-aware cameras on weekend hikes, and i was running a desktop client and looking at the world from ankara.

joaquín cuenca abela launched panoramio in spain on 3 october 2005 with two co-founders. by 2007 the photo layer was already inside google earth, and google announced the acquisition on 30 may 2007. the deal closed in july. for the next nine years panoramio was the photo geo-index that google used to populate the visual layer of every map and every globe view. at peak it had 4.16 million registered users and 94 million uploaded photos.

google announced the first shutdown on 16 september 2014. the community pushed back hard, with a petition and direct lobbying through the spanish founders, and on 2 june 2015 google reversed the decision. the reprieve held for sixteen months. on 5 october 2016 google posted the second shutdown notice, and the final user content was removed on 4 november 2016. the google earth layer carrying panoramio photos kept running until january 2018, but the upload product was gone.

google's official replacement was google maps views, which let users contribute photos directly to map locations through google's own profile system. the community features did not survive the transition. there was no equivalent forum and no photo groups. the panoramio-style aesthetic ranking did not transfer either. it was just maps photos attached to a place.

~ the rap sheet ~

~ the postmortem ~

4 november 2016 was when the upload product ended and user photos were removed from panoramio.com. the google earth layer kept the geotagged image carpet visible until january 2018, so for fifteen months you could still see the photos in google earth even though their source had been deleted. for creative commons photos, google sent 2.3 million images to wikimedia commons before pulling the rest. the panoramio upload bot is still in wikimedia's revision history.

~ what got buried with it ~

a specific category of photographer. panoramio was the gps-aware-camera hobbyist crowd, the kind of people who carried a garmin and a dslr on a weekend and uploaded geotagged jpegs as a hobby. when the upload product died, that crowd had nowhere obvious to go. flickr was alive but did not surface photos through google earth, and google maps views did not have a comparable community. the geotagged-photo hobby fragmented into a handful of small services and a lot of phone-app integration.

~ the inheritance ~

google maps views was the named successor inside google's ecosystem, but the visual layer of google earth that panoramio used to populate was largely replaced by street view imagery and aerial photogrammetry. the geotagged hobbyist photo as a unit of cartographic content is mostly gone. instagram geotags are private to instagram, and flickr keeps a small geotag database. the open geotagged-photo carpet panoramio built does not exist anywhere now.

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