Panoramio 🌍

Panoramio was a worldwide archive of accurately geolocated photos, which was owned by Google, but which they unfortunately killed off. (They never gave the reason for killing it, but all the images were freely licenced, which may not have given Google enough control of the data). Uniquely the images were curated, to make sure that they contained something of (geographic) significance - so the archive was not overrun with irrelevant images of people rather than places. A further selection process resulted in the best photos being promoted so that they appeared in Google Earth and Google Maps. When Panoramio was killed off, Google Earth became a much worse service, due to the sudden culling of its image layer.

Although Panoramio was owned by Google, it never offered the choice to search the archive based on the descriptions of the photos - instead all access was via places.

• Chesterton, Warwickshire