Something new and cool!

Well, I think it's cool. Last night I was looking at my web album for the hike I took to the top of Hackberry Mesa. I noticed a red, miniature map marker symbol the the lower right of some of the pictures. Hmm, I don't remember seeing that before. I held the pointer over it and it said, "View in Google Maps Street View". That seemed a little odd for a picture in which no streets were visible and that was taken over 1.6 miles from the nearest street. I thought Google had made a mistake. Then I clicked on it. A new window opened showing the picture, and it had several gray trapezoids in it. I clicked on one of the gray trapezoids and it opened a picture I had taken zoomed in on that area. Cool! You can go back and forth between pictures. You can view it all full screen.

It only seems to work with geotagged pictures. I'm going to take some pictures this weekend that will intentionally exploit this new feature. The trouble is, I'll have to wait a few weeks to see the result. No web albums newer than the end of November seem to have had this feature enabled. Go to the Hackberry Mesa album to check it out for yourself. I hope this feature is added to Picasa some day.

This is like the "look around" feature on Panoramio (which doesn't seem to be applied to landscape photos) or Photosynth from Microsoft.