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WGAN Forum Founder & WGAN-TV Podcast Host 31.2K Website Atlanta, Georgia Linked In Facebook Twitter YouTube TikTok Instragram Matterport Service Partner Google Street View Trusted Photographer Zillow Certified Photographer We Get Around Network Member	31.2K DanSmigrod private msg quote post Address this user	plus 1 plus 1 plus 1 0
	Hi All, @aarongeis posted this comment to the video .. Dan --- Many thanks to Dan for hosting this roundtable discussion and for inviting me to join. A few thoughts and points of clarification - I said this in a couple of ways during the discussion but my main fresh thought on SV tours since seeing the view counts for my oldest tours that had the See Inside thumbnail on the Search Knowledge Card and ranked at the top of the Maps Image Carousel is that whatever Google does with the tours on Google products is not very relevant as the tours aren't getting significant numbers of views. So getting See Inside back isn't going to happen and we shouldn't care anyway because it didn't have the impact that we thought it would. Some new dynamic way of presenting the tours on the Knowledge Card might have more impact, we'll just have to watch and see what happens. On the slow loading, Chris Petracco mentioned that reducing the file size may help get the images to load more quickly. When we were able to load images using the now discontinued SV editor I loaded images at 10240 pixels wide and they loaded quickly on SV. I always knew that Google was downsizing these image but there didn't seem to be a downside to keeping the resolution as high as possible. I've gone back and looked at some images from the Ricoh Theta that Google lent me and I see that they do load quickly. So the next thing to do is to test some images at 8192 pixels wide (tiling at multiples of 1024 px) and a slightly reduced quality level of jpeg compression and see if those load more quickly while still looking ok. We didn't discuss the issue of the 'click and go' navigation until I mentioned it was one of my big three wishes. Click-and-go is the new style of SV navigation where the user might skip ahead several positions instead of progressing one position at a time. The big problem with this is that for indoor tours you will jump into different rooms unexpectedly. It's not intuitive but if you click on the top half of the image area you will actually only progress one position at a time. If users happen to figure this out they can navigate a tour properly but they can only discover this by careful observation of trial and error. In some areas of SV you will see a continuous blue line running down the street and you can navigate on mobile devices by swiping instead of clicking. I think this feature will eventually be extended to all of SV, including our tours, and at that point, the navigation may be more intuitive. With regard to overlays; there are quite a few overlay providers for SV tours but my feeling is that given the shortcomings of the SV system when you want to create a tour to embed in a client's website you might as well start with a system that allows for higher resolution images. Roundme would be one example and you can also create custom built tours that you have to provide independent hosting for. I see those solutions as being the 'gold standard' with SV tours being a possible additional element to consider for your client, but less so now that we can see how rarely the SV tours are viewed. Source: aarongeis.com post to YouTube
	7 years ago	Post 6 • IP flag post

Quote:

Originally Posted by @aarongeis
So getting See Inside back isn't going to happen and we shouldn't care anyway because it didn't have the impact that we thought it would. Some new dynamic way of presenting the tours on the Knowledge Card might have more impact, we'll just have to watch and see what happens.

Exactly. If you are going to take away the killer feature (visibility / best way to sell the tour) -- replace it with something BETTER.

Quote:

Originally Posted by @aarongeis
On the slow loading, Chris Petracco mentioned that reducing the file size may help get the images to load more quickly. When we were able to load images using the now discontinued SV editor I loaded images at 10240 pixels wide and they loaded quickly on SV. I always knew that Google was downsizing these image but there didn't seem to be a downside to keeping the resolution as high as possible. I've gone back and looked at some images from the Ricoh Theta that Google lent me and I see that they do load quickly. So the next thing to do is to test some images at 8192 pixels wide (tiling at multiples of 1024 px) and a slightly reduced quality level of jpeg compression and see if those load more quickly while still looking ok.

Google should be creating multiple sets of images -- after all, we aren't submitting tiles and they create those. I believe that @Alin has stated multiple times that the image size that is submitted should not cause this.

Quote:

Originally Posted by DanSmigrod
We didn't discuss the issue of the 'click and go' navigation until I mentioned it was one of my big three wishes. Click-and-go is the new style of SV navigation where the user might skip ahead several positions instead of progressing one position at a time. The big problem with this is that for indoor tours you will jump into different rooms unexpectedly.

I'm glad you mentioned this as it's horrible and embarrassing when clients bring it up.

Quote:

Originally Posted by @aarongeis
In some areas of SV you will see a continuous blue line running down the street and you can navigate on mobile devices by swiping instead of clicking. I think this feature will eventually be extended to all of SV, including our tours, and at that point, the navigation may be more intuitive.

Consistency across all platforms would be excellent. GSV works better on the mobile UI. Their teams need to get parity on all platforms.

Quote:

Originally Posted by @aarongeis
With regard to overlays; there are quite a few overlay providers for SV tours but my feeling is that given the shortcomings of the SV system when you want to create a tour to embed in a client's website you might as well start with a system that allows for higher resolution images.

I'm fond of Matterport. Quality might be below DSLR, but the overall experience is magical.

9.44K Frisco, Texas	9.44K Metroplex360 private msg quote post Address this user	plus 1 plus 1 plus 1 1
	I had a great time too. I loved that PanoSkin and GoThru joined us -- they arer in an arms race to create the ultimate replacement for the Business View system. Both incredibly cool companies with great people! Great to meet and hear from the very passionate @TrustedPhotoDC. His fierce knowledge of GSV and commitment to the platform speaks volumes to how serious Google Trusted Photographers are and how important Google's handling of the new system is to Pros. Nice to also hear from Aaron Geis who absolutely loves working with GSV, but is totally frustrated by the changes too -- his voice represents a lot of the GTP/Local Guides out there. I'm curious as to how the Google Team views their responsibility to both their users and their hardware partners by their platform decisions. -- At the end of the day, I think that we all want to regain the ability to set a 'See Inside' button on the infograph for a business wherein we can set the start point and angle of the tour. It would just take accepting one tiny meta tag ... and adjusting a database query...
	7 years ago	Post 5 • IP flag post

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