Street View tips
Twelve things that are not obvious from the interface and that make the difference between looking at a road and actually exploring a place.
01
Follow the blue dots, not the blue lines
Solid lines are roads driven by car. Isolated dots are usually trekker or contributed imagery, and that is where the footpaths, parks and pedestrian streets live. The dots are where the interesting coverage hides.
02
Click the distance, not the arrow
Double-clicking a point far ahead jumps you several panoramas at once. It is much faster than clicking the arrow repeatedly, and it is the difference between crossing a city in a minute and crossing it in ten.
03
Zoom out before you zoom in
Pull back until the whole scene is in frame, work out which direction is interesting, then zoom. Zooming first and then panning is how people get lost.
04
Use the historical imagery
Where a place has been captured more than once, Google's clock control lets you step back through earlier passes. Construction sites, closed shops and changed street furniture all show up, and in a few places you can watch a building being built.
05
Check the capture date
It is shown on the imagery. A street photographed six years ago is not evidence about the street today, which matters if you are checking a property, a business or a road layout.
06
Look up
The imagery is a full sphere. Most people never tilt the camera, which means they miss roof lines, signage, cathedral fronts and the entire top half of every city.
07
Use satellite for shape, Street View for texture
Overhead tells you how a place is organised; the pavement tells you what it is like. Palm Jumeirah in Dubai and the Barcelona grid only make sense if you look at both.
08
Follow a road rather than jumping
Teleporting between landmarks tells you very little. Following one street for a mile tells you how a city changes, where the money is, and what people actually do there.
09
Try the reverse direction
Coverage often has two passes on the same road, one each way, and they were sometimes captured months apart in different light. Turning round can genuinely change the view.
10
Search the landmark, not the address
Geocoding handles named places well. Typing the name of a bridge or a square is usually more reliable than typing a street number near it.
11
Save as you go
You will not remember the coordinates of the good one. Press Save the moment something is worth keeping, and rename it later.
12
Share with the camera angle
A shared link that carries heading and pitch shows the other person what you saw. A plain address shows them a road and leaves them to hunt.
The one that matters most
Follow a road. Almost everybody uses Street View as a teleport, jumping between famous points and looking at each for ten seconds. That tells you nothing you could not get from a photograph.
Pick one street and go along it for a mile instead. You will see where the shops stop and the houses start, where the money is and where it is not, which buildings are new and which have been there a century. That is information photographs cannot carry, and it is the only thing this medium does that others do not.
The city guides each name five streets worth doing exactly that with, chosen because the change along them is worth the walk.
Common questions
How do I move faster in Street View?
Double-click a point in the distance rather than clicking the arrow. That jumps several panoramas at once and is far quicker than stepping forward one position at a time.
How do I see what a place looked like before?
Use Google's historical imagery control, shown on the panorama where more than one capture exists. It steps back through previous passes, which is how you see building sites, closed shops and older street layouts.
How do I find footpaths and pedestrian streets?
Look for isolated blue dots rather than solid blue lines when you drop the peg on the map. Dots usually mean the imagery was captured on foot, which is what gets you into parks, alleys and coastal paths.
Is Street View imagery live?
No, and it is not close. Each street is a single capture from a single day, and the date varies from months to several years old. Google shows the capture date on the imagery itself.