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Journalism of Courage
Technology giant Google will shut down Panoramio, the location-centric photo sharing service that the company used to augment its Google Maps and Google Earth services, in November, a media report said. Panoramio added new pictures at the end of every month.
Panoramio was founded in 2005 Spanish entrepreneurs Eduardo Aguilar and Joaquin Abela. The service was then acquired by Google in 2007, will show its last image on November 4. Google previously tried to shut the service down in 2014. At the time, its users successfully petitioned the company to keep it open, Tech Crunch reported on Saturday.
“Today, with photo upload tools in Google Maps and our Local Guides programme, we are providing easy options for you to share your photos with an active and growing community. As such, we’ve decided to now close down Panoramio,” Google wrote in an email to Panoramio users on Saturday.
Google is also encouraging Panoramio users to join its Local Guides programme and to upload photos directly to Google Maps. The company has said in the past that Panoramio has become a redundant platform since all its functions are already integrated in to Google Maps.
The users who have linked their Panoramio and Google+ accounts need not worry about their photos as Google will automatically copy their images to a Google Album archive. According to the company, these images will not use any of the user’s Google storage quota.
Users will still be able to access their photos in Panoramio for a year after November 4.
