Forgive me if this has already been asked but searching on 'Google Maps Views' brings up rather a lot of irrelevant hits.
Is there an API to display the nearest (say) 5 photos to a particular long/lat location from the photos available on Google Maps Views? I don't particularly need them on a map, just to embed thumbnails of the photos and link to the originals.
eg I have a page for Callanish stone circle. Could I embed images from Views based on a long/lat query?
Here's what is on Views for that location:
https://www.google.com/maps/views/explore?hl=en&gl=gb&vm=1&ll=54.596562,-3.104517&bd=54.586641,-3.121855,54.606481,-3.087179&z=15&pv=2
I read that Views is what is supposed to be taking over from Panoramio. I know Panoramio had an API but that's being shut down.
If this is possible, does anyone have an example of something similar? Showing photos on a map would be OK if that's the only way to do it.
Many thanks
Andy
http://www.megalithic.co.uk/article.php?sid=42
The Google Maps API can do it and the imagery carousel at the bottom of Google Maps website is a good example of it.
Nearest photos
You can retrieve the nearest photos to a location using the Places Photo feature, which is part of the Places library. As you want multiple photos, you need to use Place Details requests - function getDetails(). It will return up to ten PlacePhoto objects.
You probably want to submit a small height/width since you create thumbnails. And send another request with a larger height/width when a thumbnail is clicked.
Nearest Street View panorama
If, by chance, a road close to Callanish stone circle has been photographed by Street View, you can add this imagery as well.
Requests for Street View panoramas include a radius parameter. The callback function returns the nearest imagery within the requested radius. See this example. Thereby, you can retrieve one panorama by passing a very large radius.
I am looking for a script / tool which will allow me to define a route on Google Maps and then create a series of frames where the map slowly moves along at a given zoom level while drawing the (previously defined) route.
If it is hard to imagine think of a mini map/overview for a time-lapse/video of a drive in a car. The time-lapse/video shows you the view through the windshield and this minimap/overview shows you where the footage is taken on a map. This is actually what I'm going to use it for.
Does anyone know of such a tool or a better place to ask this question (if this is not a proper place)?
If it does not exist I will have to create it using the Google Maps API.
The question is pretty descriptive.
I am working on a website that provides locations for filming.
All the data in the site is currently stored in a MySQL database including geocode data for google maps.
I need to show polygon areas for the different london boroughs that has locations.
I have all the data as kml files, idealy i would like to store this in the MySQL database.
I have had success using fusion tables to display this data, but it seems silly to me to have to have this data duplicated on google just to use a fusion map layer, can i simply use a kml layer to render this data rather than having to create a fusion table and rendering it from that?
If so, is there a resource someone could point me to for more information?
UPDATE:
Thank you for the responses so far, i thought i would update the question with a little more info .
I eventually want to have all the areas displayed at the same time on my map and then when an area is clicked on ideally it would take you to another page on the website showing locations for that specific area.
I had initially tried using KML layers but i was getting errors saying my KML was invalid.
The KML was initially stored in a field in my database table, i think probably the errors were due to me not understanding exactly how google read in the KML data.
Using polygons would be far simpler to implement as i can get this data via JSON and then render the polygons from that.
I know now its not possible to have info windows with polygons, but i would just prefer to jump directly to another website page with info for that particular area using a click handler rather than show an info window.
Alternatively as suggested showing a tool-tip with a brief description of the area and a link to the page would be better, how the tooltip itself, is it possible to render on top the map?
I am slightly worried that I will reach the layer limit for the KML.
Is it possible to have multiple polygons rendered with KML on one layer, or do i need a separate layer for each clickable area?
The Google Maps API provides a pretty straightforward method to draw polygons.
Basic Example:
var polygon = new google.maps.Polygon({
map: your_google_map_instance,
paths: array_of_latlng_points,
fillColor: "#336699",
fillOpacity: .5,
})
EDIT: For this approach, you would need to parse your KML files (sorry, must've missed that when I first read it). You can import the KML files to a KML layer
You can overlay Polygons using KmlLayer, FusionTablesLayer (as you know), or native google.maps.Polygon objects.
KmlLayer and FusionTablesLayer render them as tiles, so for lots of Polygons (if you only need click events) will be more efficient. There are limitations on the number of KmlLayers that can be displayed on the map at one time and on FusionTablesLayer (but those don't seem to be causing you problems).
There are also third party parsers available for KML (geoxml3, geoxml-v3) which will take your KML and render it as native google.maps.Polygon objects. For lots of Polygons, this will be less efficient than tile based rendering, but it does allow mouseover/mouseout, and changing the properties of the Polygons dynamically.
You could also try data layers what have lots of events so you can display tooltips, info window, status text on various mouse events.
See samples in documentation:
https://developers.google.com/maps/documentation/javascript/datalayer
If you have many polygons (where the actual value of many depends on multiple factors, can be anywhere between 100 and 1,000) the best is to use a built in layer type. The fastest are the ones rendered on server, e.g. kml layer because this doesn't create hundreds of DOM elements in browser but still exposes click events so infoboxes can be displayed for each item.
In the worst case you can implement your own rendering with an image map, obviously by using an existing library like mapnik.
https://developers.google.com/maps/documentation/javascript/maptypes#ImageMapTypes
I have a Google map I have created to highlight the location of several support groups by adding my own pins using my maps and embedding this into my website.
Is there a Google widget of any description to allows people to search my custom map and find their nearest support group (or nearest pin).
I have read through the Google maps stuff but cant seem to find anything that meets my requirements.
Any help appreciated.
The map has no clue about which markers or overlays you have put on it. Therefore there are no way you can do what you want using Google Maps directly. You can however do something else.
When you create your markers/overlays and place them on the map you can add them to an array. When you users then enters a location you can search through that array to find the markers that are closest to the location the user has entered. Google Maps API has a method for getting the distance between two latlngs, but you can also use an ordinary Haversine formula for calculating it.
Once you have found the closest markers it is not hard making sure they are the only ones that are shown on the map.
I'm looking looking for a tool that will allow me to make a map exactly like this:
http://datasearch.uts.edu.au/about/mapsdirections/map.cfm
Basically I need to put shapes around buildings in the satellite view and then slap a marker and information window on them so that I can specify the building name and contents.
So the main issue is that I need the ability to draw shapes directly onto the maps as I don't fancy taking down the lat lng of each corner of the polygon.
Ideally what I'd like to do is have an online application that exports those points to KML, and then I would display google maps on my site and import that kml to display it.
Other suggestions welcome!
Jason
Found a polygon creator
http://www.the-di-lab.com/polygon/
It's simple to use and allows you to copy and paste straight into your code. Would be nice if it had a button that said sent to kml though..