Searching maps and retrieving driving directions at Google Maps, has been possible for a while now. But after asking some friends and family, it seems that Panoramio and street view aren’t very familiar with most people. It gives the whole Google Maps thing an extra dimension. You are able to travel the world without leaving your desk, with just a computer and a working Internet connection.. and we all have that, don’t we?

If you search for any location with Google Maps, you can select the ‘Photos’ option. After doing this, you’ll see lots of tiny images appearing on your map. Those photos are user contributed via the Panoramio webite, and can be viewed in full size by clicking on them. These photos are also included in Google Earth.

At first I was impressed by this, until I found out about the street view feature. Unfortunately this isn’t available for all cities and locations on the world, but Google is very busy to include more streets every day. At the left side of the map, you’ll see an orange icon, drag this to the desired street and you’ll get a nice result looking like this:

Mainly the big cities are fully accessable by street view, because it takes a lot of time to collect all the imagery. Google has drivers with cameras on their cars, to capture the images. Recently they hit a deer and the pictures were available on Google Maps. You can find the news article of the Guardian to read the full story here.

If you haven’t used street view before, you should really check it out. It’s fantastic!