Street View Germany
Germany has the strangest Street View history of any country in Europe, and it shows on the screen. For twelve years the imagery was frozen in 2011 while the rest of the world was rephotographed four or five times over. That changed in 2023, and what you see now depends entirely on where you point.
City guides
2 written guides for Germany, each with the streets worth walking and the views worth opening.
Why German Street View looked frozen for a decade
Google launched Street View in Germany in 2010 for twenty cities, after a public argument about privacy that has no real parallel elsewhere. Residents were given a window to ask for their building to be blurred, and 244,000 households took it, a little under three per cent of those covered.
The reaction did not stop there. A small number of people went looking for the blurred houses and egged them, and others posted notes through the doors saying Google was fine by them. Google stopped expanding Street View in Germany afterwards, and the imagery sat untouched from 2011.
Cars returned on 22 June 2023, the first new German capture in over a decade. One detail matters if you are looking at your own street: the old blur requests were not carried over. Anyone who wanted their building blurred in 2010 and still wants it has to ask again.
What that means when you are exploring
Major cities have fresh imagery. Berlin, Hamburg, Munich, Cologne and Frankfurt were among the first rephotographed, so the cars, the shopfronts and the building sites are recent.
Away from those, you can still land in 2011. It is worth checking the date in the corner of the view before you conclude that a shop has closed or a road has changed, because in Germany more than anywhere else the picture may be fifteen years old.
Blurred buildings are still common in the older imagery and much rarer in the new. A whole terrace with one house smeared out is the most recognisably German thing in Street View.
Worth opening beyond the city guides
The Romantic Road through Bavaria, where the villages are the point rather than the towns. Rothenburg ob der Tauber is walled and almost entirely intact.
The Middle Rhine between Bingen and Koblenz, which is castles on both banks for sixty kilometres and reads far better at street level than from above.
The Ruhr, where the coal and steel works have been turned into parks rather than demolished. Zollverein in Essen is the clearest example and is on the UNESCO list.
Saxon Switzerland, south-east of Dresden, for sandstone towers that look nothing like the rest of the country.
Places to open
8 locations in Germany, each one a single click into Street View at the right spot and facing the right way.
Questions about Street View in Germany
Why are some German houses blurred in Street View?
Because their occupants asked. In 2010 Germany was given an opt-out that no other country got at that scale, and 244,000 households used it. Those blurs stayed in the 2011 imagery. The requests were not carried into the 2023 recapture, so a house blurred in the old view may be visible in the new one.
Is Google Street View up to date in Germany?
In the big cities, yes, since Google resumed capturing in June 2023. Outside them you can still be looking at 2011 imagery. The date is shown in the corner of the view and is worth checking before you trust what you see.
How do I see my own street in Germany?
Type the address into the search box on this site and the view opens on it. If the imagery is old you will see it in the date stamp, and if the building is blurred it was blurred at the request of whoever lived there.