- Panoramio is completely free to use
- Community driven site for exploring places through photography
- Provided by everyone's favourite search provider Google
- Send links to your photos to friends and family
- Search by place to see the most popular photos of that place
- Different from other sites as it doesn't show you people, just places
- Tag photos so that others can search for them more easily
- Links in with the Panaramio layer of Google Earth
- Up to 2Gb of space to store photos
- Use favourites lists to keep track of your favourite photos and photographers
- Geocode your photos to show the exact position they were taken
- Suggest corrections to other peoples locations to benefit the community
- Completely free to use
- Works with almost any device that can run a web browser
Panoramio is a community driven site that aims to let you explore interesting places in the world by looking at other people's photos and in turn sharing your own. It is not quite a traditional photo sharing web site, but it still allows you to show off your own photos to your friends while contributing to the community effort. The service is provided by Google and is completely free to use, regularly updated and easy to use.
The best way to discover what Panoramio is all about is to visit the site and search for some of your favourite places in the world. You will be surprised at how many photos of them come up - and not just the obvious landmarks either. The interface is very easy to use and when you search for a place, the most popular photos appear largest, so the community helps drive its effectiveness. You can also access the Panoramio layer on Google Earth to view the photos that have made the transition from the web site to the application. Often these are some of the best as they have to be reviewed before being allowed through.
To start uploading your own photos you must sign up for a free account. Once you have done this there is an easy to use uploader which lets you get photos onto your account. The uploader isn't the greatest we have seen, but it certainly does the job and most people should have no problems with it. Once you have uploaded photos it is easy to share them by sending out direct links to either a specific photo or all the photos on your account. This lacks the control that dedicated photo sharing sites offer, but is a quick and simple way of sharing a few snaps.
The real power of Panoramio shows when you start tagging and locating your photos. An easily accessible form allows you to specify exactly where the photo was taken and associate some keywords with it so that other people can find it. Once a photo has been located it will show up when someone searches for that particular location and add to the community effort of mapping the most interesting places in the world. If you have a camera with built in GPS then Panoramio can also take the coordinates embedded in the photo and locate it using them, saving you the hassle of doing it yourself.
Panoramio is an interesting idea from a company that keeps churning out interesting ideas. It is quite widely used and you will be able to find photos of just about anything on it. If you are interested in participating in the community and sharing your photographs this way it is a great service, but if you want a straightforward photo sharing service then it might be better to look at some of the entries in our top ten list.
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