Here is why. First, we’re seeing a rise in traffic to mapping sites such as Google Earth and Google Maps. The summer issue of the State of the American Traveler Report states that more than 19% of all online travel planners have used an online 3-D mapping such as Google Earth. Recent traffic reports have shown that Google Maps have generated 71.5 million visits per month and is currently the 22nd most popular web site in the country.
Images on Google Earth Maps are furnished by Panoramio. In addition, Google Maps has added an option to view photos on the screens of their mapping program. Those photos are also provided by Panoramio.
On the Google Maps screen you will see a “More” button in the top right navigation. Click on the more button and you will have two options: Photos, Videos and Wikipedia. When you choose the photo option, you will see images populated from Panoramio site. If you choose the Wiki option, you will see several “W”’s all representing entries from Wikipedia in those specific locations and video shows popular videos loaded to YouTube.
Panoramio images have also been recently integrated in to the new Yahoo Glue application - see this Glue page from the city of Philadelphia. And, early test searches have shown that the Panoramio photos were getting better placement on the results pages than Flickr images (owned by Yahoo).
A few tips when uploading your images to Panoramio:
- Be sure they are geo tagged on the map, so they appear in the proper location.
- Add a description to the photo so visitors can identify where it is or what is happening.
- Add tags so it can be searched or found via keywords.
