My preliminary observations on Google Views: Overall the panos look pretty good, at least on laptop and smaller screen sizes. People new to panos are extremely impressed. But on a big screen the resolution I am using is not enough. Playback quality varies, there are some visible cube face seams, straight lines that became wavy, also banding in sky gradients. I still hate the navigation interface, not so much the drag-drag-drag (which I grudgingly accept), as the jumpy zooming in and out. The submission process is absurdly inefficient. If they want serious contributors they need to provide batch input tools. I have another 10,000 panos looking for a home... When uploaded to Google+ (the first step in getting photo spheres on Maps/Views), equirectangular images are supposed to be automatically recognized as panos. Sometimes they are, sometimes they arent. Annoying. The on-line tool for tagging images as panoramic is slow and cumbersome. I like that titles and captions can be added and edited on-line after upload. But the inability to edit such things as initial view and limits in any way other than through EXIF is aggravating. Also, at present it seems that if I want to upgrade an image to a corrected or higher resolution version, I have to essentially start over. Maybe these tools will be available soon, it is changing rapidly. I am concerned that my panos appear in so many places within the Google realm, and in most of them lose their titles and/or captions. Google is being good (so far as I have discovered) in keeping my name with each one - respecting moral rights under the Berne Convention. But IMHO this bears watching. Putting groups of pictures together in albums in Google+ is helpful, but doesnt carry through to Views. The constellation method of linking images together doesnt appeal to me, and the automatic generation of stories is annoying. The images in Views are in sort of a semi-random order (more or less by last date modified), which makes it hard to manage a large portfolio. Google assigns a location name for each panorama, and if you do not provide a title this serves as one. The place names they pull up are often county names (in the US), which means nothing to anybody. If the pano is accessed from Google Maps the place given is usually the nearest business that pays Google to be put on the map, usually not what the picture is really of. Which raises the issue of monetization... Sorry that I will probably miss discussion of these points, but I am desperate to get out on the road again.
Posted on: Tue, 22 Jul 2014 19:23:52 +0000
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