Street View

[+Bobbinz]

I don't know if this has been mentioned before, and apologies if it has but is there any way of getting a google street view view on the large map (i.e. http://www.geocaching.com/map/beta/default.aspx).

 

It is there on the smaller maps on individual cache pages, but not this one.

 

Thanks,

Adam

[+Blue_Suede]

Well, the Streetview function seems to have gone forever. I really hate to be forced to switch to another map just to see what the area looks like. At the moment I'm planning a trip to the US and Canada (I live in Sweden) and would love to stop at the NICE places, not just because there's a cache there ;-)

 

Please, give it back!

[+NYPaddleCacher]

I don't know if this has been mentioned before, and apologies if it has but is there any way of getting a google street view view on the large map (i.e. http://www.geocaching.com/map/beta/default.aspx).

 

It is there on the smaller maps on individual cache pages, but not this one.

 

Thanks,

Adam

 

If you're looking at a Street view you'll be viewing an area where only one cache is likely going to exist, thus using the Google Maps link from a specific cache page works fine for seeing what in the area. If you want to see where multiple caches are relative to each other (which you can do with the "big map") zooming down to Street view level kinda defeats the purpose of a "big map" with all the nearby caches on it.

[jri]

It's unlikely that Groundspeak will bring back Streetview, either on the big map or the cache pages, for the same reasons that they abandoned Google Maps. Using Streetview properly requires use of the Google Maps API, which would cost them money if lots of people used it. They could put a link to Streetview on Google Maps amongst the list of other map links on the cache pages. That wouldn't incur any costs, but it wouldn't work very well either: Streetview isn't available in all countries, and where it is available, it only works at coordinates that are near streets with images. The only easy way to work out if there will be images available is to use the API.

 

That said, if one-click Streetview is a must-have for you, you can set up a bookmarklet that will take you to Google Maps and open Streetview. Create a new bookmark/favourite in your browser, rename it to something like "GC Streetview", and cut'n'paste the code below as the destination of the link.

 

javascript:document.location="http://maps.google.com/maps?q=&layer=c&cbll="+(/map/.test(location.pathname)?MapSettings.Map.getCenter().toUrl():(lat+","+lng))+"&cbp=12,0,0,0,0";

When you click on the bookmarklet from a cache page, it should give you a Streetview of the cache coordinates. When you use it on the main map it will use the coordinates of the map centre. It won't go precisely to the coordinates, just to the nearest spot where Google had images. And if the coordinates are too far from a street that Google has surveyed, you just get a map of North America instead. I've only tested it in Firefox, but the bookmarklet should work in most other browsers too.

 

If that's not good enough, and you are using a browser that supports userscripts, one of the features of Geocaching Map Enhancements is to let you click somewhere on the big map, and see the Streetview for that location. However, it works the same way as the bookmarklet, so has the same problems, and it doesn't have a Streetview link on cache pages (yet...).