Google puts at our disposal a large number of utilities and applications, with which it makes our lives easier. But without a doubt one of the most used and recognized is Google Maps. With this tool from the Mountain View company we can carry out countless daily tasks such as finding our street, an address, tracing a route by car, on foot, by public transport, finding the restaurant where we have stayed for dinner … or simply having fun while traveling. from our mobile phone for cities that are not ours.
Surely Google Maps is one of the applications that we use the most and there are many tricks for Google Maps that help us the most on a day-to-day basis, but perhaps many people do not really know how their image capture process works, or have doubts about how he manages to photograph and map the entire planet so that we can later see it on our mobile. Whether your questions are related to satellite images or if you want to know how to add your own photographs to the application, here we try to solve those questions so that you know better that app that you have installed on your mobile.
Google Maps satellite photos
Google Maps has many functions and among them is that of seeing from a bird’s eye view, or rather, from a satellite view, an entire city, a country or the entire world. So that these satellite images do not lose quality and that by moving the image away from our street to reach the view of an entire Autonomous Community, the map does not become an indistinguishable stain, Google has the best quality and always tries to help innovation to give a better service to users.
Since 2016, Google Maps is fed by images taken by the Landsat 8 satellite . Landsat 8 was launched in 2013 by NASA and improves the performance of its ancestor Landsat 7, since it offers greater clarity in the images it takes of the Earth’s surface and also sends twice as many images as its old version. Landsat 8 takes 16 days to complete a journey around Earth and thanks to its high-tech cameras it is able to better recognize and capture details and colors.
According to Google, Landsat 8 captures around a petabyte of information with more than 700 trillion pixels in its images . Unimaginable what that means in a photograph, but it obviously translates into high definition, higher resolution images and therefore more quality.
But that is not all. In Google Maps we are not shown the raw images taken by the satellite. They are improved, analyzed and reviewed by a group of experts from the Mountain View company around the world, who are responsible for adding and correcting the data, for all tasks ranging from image collection and source verification. until the correction of the map in search of errors or inaccuracies, before these images become public domain.
Satellites on Google Maps
Before Landsat 8, as we have said, Google Maps used the images obtained by the Landsat 7 satellite. But it suffered a hardware failure and the photographs it sent appeared with large diagonal stripes. Thanks to its many shipments this problem could be corrected, but with the launch of Landsat 8, which also sent twice as many images and with higher quality, it became obsolete. Landsat 7 was a great achievement, seeing the cloudless land surface. In previous satellite images, annoying clouds almost always appeared, hindering the vision of the territory in question, but thanks to sending snapshots, a cloudless map of the Earth was created.
The current Landsat 8 satellite was launched on February 11, 2013 and passes over the same point on Earth every 16 days, which greatly improves the performance of its predecessor. It has on board two devices called Operational Land Imager (OLI) and Thermal Infrared Sensor (TIRS) . These two sensors are the ones that provide their sharp images at 30 meters resolution (visible, near infrared and short wave infrared), 100 meters (thermal) and 15 meters (panchromatic). In addition, the OLI sensor is in charge of detecting cirrus clouds in the atmosphere and is also used for coastal observation.
Landsat project satellites
The Landsat project, from which Google Maps takes advantage of its satellite images, is a joint program between NASA and the United States Geological Survey (USGS) that collects high-level scientific images, not only for Google Maps, of our planet. Eight satellites have been launched to date, seven of them successfully.
- Landsat 1: 1972
- Landsat 2: 1975
- Landsat 3: 1978
- Landsat 4: 1982
- Landsat 5: 1985
- Landsat 6: 1993. Launch failed.
- Landsat 7: 1999
- Landsat 8: Landsat Data Continuity Mission. Released February 11, 2013.
How to upload photos to Google Maps
Beyond the satellite photographs that Google Maps makes so that we have a bird’s eye view, users also add their own photographs and videos to share with other people who may be useful. You can upload videos or photos whenever you want or remove them when you think they are not useful or when you don’t want them to be seen anymore.
Add our photos to Google Maps
You can add photos to Google Maps from your computer, from Android or from iPhone and iPad. From the site or from the “Your contributions” menu that you can access from Google Maps.
- Open Google Maps and find the place you want
- Slide down
- Go to the “Photos” section
- Click on the “Add photos” box
- All your images from the gallery will appear
- Choose from recent ones or click on “Folder”
- Find the one you want, add a text and upload it
You will be able to upload photographs of parks, buildings of interest, monuments … But it is not allowed to do so with specific addresses or coordinates.
Create and add photos to Google Street View
Another of the great utilities that we have discovered in Google Maps is its Google Street View, which allows us to walk at ground level through the different streets around the world. If we want to contribute to its huge catalog of images and to its car that is filming on the roads of the cities, we can do so with the following steps that the company itself indicates.
- Create photos with a phone
- Open the Street View app
- Tap the camera at the bottom of the screen
- Tap on the option «Take a spherical photo»
- Accept Street View permits if you didn’t already have them
- Open the camera
- Follow the instructions given by the app
The 360 ° photo will be mounted and saved in the “Private” tab of the application. It will also be saved to your phone (unless you disable this option).
- Create photos with a 360 ° camera
- Set up and connect your phone and 360 ° camera.
- Tap the blue linked camera icon Street View Camera.
- In the “Profile” tab, at the bottom right, you will see a blue circle with an orange ring that goes around it every time you take a 360 ° photo. Do not disconnect or turn off the camera until all your photos appear in the “Profile” tab.
Local Guides
Google’s Local Guides program that offers rewards to all users who provide reviews or information about places of interest. Contribution such as videos, photos, sites or answers to questions from other people who use the service. As we give information and reviews, we get Google scores and rewards. It is free to upload photographs and we can help other people to know more details about that site . You will get a series of points according to what you contribute: complete reviews, answers to questions, photos and videos …
