Google Maps Platform: Ten Photos Are Worth Ten Thousand Words

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Ten Photos Are Worth Ten Thousand Words

Thursday, December 6, 2012

At least I think that’s how the saying goes. Today, we are announcing two new features for the Google Places API that can add some visual pop to your applications: Place Photos and Radar Search.

Place Photos

Photos are one of the most highly requested features from our developers, and we’re confident that the extensive inventory from our Google+ Local pages will suit developers’ local photo needs. To include your own photos in the API, please upload them to the place’s Google+ Page. With Place Photos, each Place Search response will include a reference to a photo, and each Place Details response will include up to 10. The photo fields contain various metadata, as well as a reference that are used to retrieve the photo via the photos service. We also offer a built-in resizing functionality, so your requests can specify the photo’s maximum width and height.

Radar Search

In addition to Place Photos, we wanted to give developers easier access to the comprehensive database underlying the Places API; and what better way to showcase our Place data than by allowing bigger result sets? With Radar Search, you can access up to 200 locations and Place References with one query, no paging needed, giving you more data to play with.

Give this example a try to find the best areas in Sydney for restaurants with nice views, or where to shop for clothes in Paris - this is where the name came from, at a high zoom level, it resembles a radar image. We look forward to seeing even more beautiful visualizations from developers.

The Places API team always appreciates developer feedback so we encourage you to continue requesting additional features, or reporting any problems you find, using the Google Maps API Issue Tracker. Our Stack Overflow community is also a great resource for any technical questions.

Posted by Khang Tran, Google Places API Engineer