For your viewing pleasure: a new and improved way to explore online photos

When you’re curious about a new place - be it a restaurant that you haven’t yet tried or a popular tourist attraction you’re considering visiting on an upcoming trip - you may find it useful to see what that place looks like in advance. For this reason, Place pages make it possible to visually explore various locations by aggregating and displaying photos from around the web.

Today, we’re offering you a better, more streamlined way to view these photos. With this new feature, you can easily flip through a whole collection of photos and find the sites on the web that have relevant pictures of a given place. Photos that have been uploaded by our Panoramio or Google Places users will appear in high-resolution as an overlay when users click on them. For photos from other sources, you can easily click on a specific photo to see more and visit the site it comes from.



This simple and intuitive online album experience makes it easier to explore all the wonderful photographs of places all over the world. For example, the above photos on the Place page for Coit Tower in San Francisco really help bring the place to life since they’re shot from multiple angles and different times of day, and provide context about this landmark’s location in San Francisco.

If you’re interested in uploading your photos of places and making them more discoverable online, check out Panoramio, a great way to share geo-tagged photos on the Web.

By Sascha Häberling, Software Engineer

Show customers where you'll go with Google Places

Not all businesses serve their customers from a brick-and-mortar storefront. Folks like photographers, piano tuners, and plumbers tend to travel around town to provide their services, and may operate from home. To better connect with all the customers they serve, these businesses can now use Google Places to specify a service area -- that is, where they’re willing to travel to do business.

If you operate one of these types of businesses, you can set a service area for a listing in your Google Places account quickly and easily. If you have a limit to how far away you’re willing to travel, you can set your service area as a circle around a specific location. If you have a particular list of places where you work, you can list your areas served (by zip codes, cities, counties, or even neighborhoods).

When customers search for you on Google Maps, they’ll see something like this:

If you run your business from a home or private office and don’t have a location for customers to visit, you can choose to show your service area but mark the listing address as private in your Google Places account. When a customer searches for you, they’ll see the business service area, but no specific location marker:


In addition to letting business owners list their service areas, we’ve also aggregated data from third-party sources to expand the number of businesses with service areas and help keep the information accurate and up-to-date. To see a business’ service areas, click on the “show service area” option (when available) in the info bubble. To learn more about service areas on Google Maps and in your Google Places account, take a look at this short introductory video we’ve put together:

Posted by Ari Bezman, Product Manager