Tips & Tutorials for publishing in Google+ and Google Maps
Want to display your Google photosphere outside of Google applications perhaps embedded into a blog or webpage? Unfortunately in all of the changes taking place with Google Maps the embed option is no longer available for photospheres published outside of Street View. This tutorial is the first part in getting the required code that you can use in a number of external applications.
Adding MetaData in Photospheres for Google Maps, using Mac and Windows, has been simplified by using ExifTool and the companion app pyExifToolGui. Until recently that is. The recent release on the Mac of El Capitan broke the interface between the two applications and forced us into using the Terminal to run ExifTool. Thanks to the directions of users from the GitHub Forums there is now a way to fix the link. This tutorial takes you through the process step by step.
Update 13/6/2017: There have been numerous changes in the way Google Photospheres are published and viewed in the past 12 months. For a long time the embed option wasn't available but Google have reinstated it and provided tools for setting the iFrame size and previewing the result. I've updated the post to highlight the changes but I've retained the old, now redundant method, just in case Google take away the embed option again.
Update 21/1/2016: Jim Popenoe just posted that Google have made some progress updating Google Maps and it's now possible to embed Photospheres without requiring Javascript or an API key. In 5 simple steps you can embed your Photospheres using an iFrame. Read more to see how.
As Google continue to change and rearrange Google Maps and Photospheres functionality comes and goes. In this instance Google has reinstated the ability to generate embed code for a published photosphere and this tutorial is no longer valid so it has been removed. Other options for embedding still remain and I'd recommend the following tutorials; Street View HTML Code Generator and Embed your Photospheres in your blog/webpage
If you publish 360˚ panoramas to Google Maps and you love using ExifTool and pyExifToolGui and you're upset because you've just upgraded to El Capitan and it's not working anymore then this is the tutorial for you. If you publish 360˚ panoramas and you're upset because can't use photo-sphere.appspot anymore because it's offline then this tutorial can show you a quick and easy way to add your Google Map specific metadata.
Update 6 September, 2015: Google "Blue Dots" are back and E Kreative has created a Pano ID Extractor tool that allows you to retrieve a photosphere ID. This is a great tool as we can now use the id in the embed code to circumvent the lack of the embed option in the share menu. In the post below I've added in information on how to use the Pano ID Extractor tool.
Let's hope that this loss of functionality is only temporary and that Google developers will reinstate it asap.
Tony
A step by step tutorial on how to locate old Map View Constellations and create embed code to show them in web pages. Note: with the changes in Google Maps this functionality may change at any time
In this tutorial I'll show you how to prepare non-android created 360˚ panoramas for uploading to Google Maps Views via Mac OSX.
Thanks to Milo Timbol for his excellent blog on "How to upload non-android 360 panoramas to Google Maps". It was the solution I had been searching for. Milo takes you through the Windows version however I needed a Mac solution and came up with the method that is described here.
This is a follow on to Milo's blog and it provides an update for his "Method 2: The faster but more complicated way" in a step-by-step workflow for Mac OSX users.
