You Can Now Add Photospheres, Street View To Your Website

Fancy adding a bit of scenery to your website? Or maybe you want to give viewers even more detailed directions to your place of business than what a map can provide. Whatever your purpose, Google's got you covered. In addition to the Google Maps Embed API that they expanded last March, the Google Maps team has now added Photospheres and Street Views to their list, allowing developers and website owners to generate HTML snippets that they can then embed in their webpages for all to behold.

Embedding Google Maps inside web pages really has a lot of use cases, especially for businesses and establishments that need to let their potential customers know where exactly in the world they are. In the past, it was already possible to embed at most one map, but in a lot of cases, even one is just not enough. And so Google unveiled the Embed API so that website owners can have multiple instances to their hearts content.

Street Views and Photospheres, on the other hand, might have more limited applications, but they do have valid use cases aside from navigation. Photospheres, for example, have developed a social aspect, where people share and comment on these 360-degree photos taken all over the world. Street View would be their more interactive counterparts, allowing users to navigate through places and explore on their own, within certain limits.

Those two features are now also available in the Embed API. Users need just enter a latitude and longitude, or in the case of a Photosphere, a Panorama ID, and have the HTML snippet, basically an iframe, generated and ready to use. Since they are part of the Google Maps Embed API, they are free to use and as many times as you want. You will, however, need to register for an API key, which is, fortunately, also free.

SOURCE: Google