Panoramio

The Spanish photo map Google bought for Google Earth and closed a decade later, taking millions of geotagged pictures off the map

Shut down
19902026

Panoramio was a geolocated photo-sharing site founded in Spain by Joaquín Cuenca Abela and Eduardo Manchón Aguilar in 2005, whose pictures appeared as a layer in Google Earth. Google bought it in 2007. It grew to tens of millions of photos placed on the map by a large community of landscape photographers. Google announced its closure in 2014, relented after protests, and shut it on 4 November 2016, moving linked photos to Google Maps.

Timeline [edit]

  1. 2005
  2. October 2005 Launch
    Panoramio launches

    Photos dragged onto a Google Map.

  3. 2006
  4. 2006 Feature
    Panoramio layer in Google Earth

    The blue squares over every landmark.

  5. 2007
  6. 30 May 2007 Acquisition
    Google announces the acquisition

    Completed in July 2007.

  7. 2010
  8. 20 January 2010 other
    The founders leave Google
  9. 2014
  10. 24 September 2014 other
    Closure planned, then postponed

    Founders and users petition Google.

  11. 2016
  12. 7 October 2016 Shutdown announced
    Panoramio to close on 4 November 2016

    Linked photos to move to Google Maps.

  13. 4 November 2016 Shutdown
    Panoramio closes

    Unlinked photos deleted after a year.

The site through time

Browse panoramio.com as it was, via the Internet Archive's Wayback Machine:

2005 2007 2009 2011 2013 2015 2016 Full archive →

Ownership [edit]

Panoramio (Cuenca and Manchón) 2005–2007 Founded Founded in Zaragoza, Spain
Google 2007–2016 Acquisition Announced 30 May 2007; the photo layer in Google Earth

Why it shut down [edit]

Official line: Google announced on 7 October 2016 that Panoramio would close on 4 November 2016 and that users should move their photos to Google Maps and Local Guides; photos from accounts linked to a Google account were carried over, everything else was deleted a year later. Google had first tried to close it in September 2014, when a petition from the founders and users persuaded it to keep the site running for two more years.

Our analysis: Panoramio was acquired for one job, putting good user photos on Google Earth and Google Maps, and it did that job so well that Google eventually decided it wanted the photos without the site. Local Guides and Maps uploads gave Google the same pictures under its own terms; a separate community with its own rules, forums and identity was overhead. What was lost was the archive: a decade of carefully placed landscape photography, much of it from people who never had a Google account.

History [edit]

Photos on the map

Joaquín Cuenca and Eduardo Manchón built Panoramio in the summer of 2005 in Zaragoza, launched it in October, and made a simple thing: upload a photo, drag it onto a Google Map to say where it was taken. Within a year Google Earth had added a Panoramio layer, and the little blue photo squares that appeared over every mountain and cathedral in the world became one of the ways people used Google Earth. On 30 May 2007 Google announced it was buying the company, and the deal closed in July; the founders stayed until January 2010.

Panoramio kept its own community, with monthly photo contests, group discussions and rules that favoured landscape and place over people, and its selection process fed the best pictures to Google Earth and later Google Maps. It reached millions of users and tens of millions of geotagged photos, and for a certain kind of photographer, the one who hikes to a viewpoint and comes back with a panorama, it was the site.

Closed, spared, closed

In September 2014 Google said Panoramio would be folded into Google Maps Views and its photos migrated; the founders and more than 10,000 users signed a petition, and Google backed off, saying it would keep the site going while it worked on the details. Two years later, on 7 October 2016, it announced the end: the site would stop accepting uploads on 4 November 2016, photos from accounts linked to Google would move to Google Maps and appear on the contributor's Local Guides profile, and everything else would be deleted after a year. Panoramio.com went dark on schedule; the layer in Google Earth was replaced by Maps photos, and a good deal of the archive was not carried over.

The domain today

panoramio.com redirects to a Google Maps help page about the shutdown.

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Sources [edit]

  1. Google acquires Panoramio The Register 4 June 2007 [archived]
  2. Panoramio "very comfortable at Google", co-founder says on way out the door TechCrunch 20 January 2010 [archived]
  3. Panoramio founders try persuading Google not to kill site CNET 24 September 2014
  4. Google shuts down Panoramio TechCrunch 7 October 2016 [archived]
  5. Photo-sharing site Panoramio falls off the map, discontinued in favor of Google Maps Digital Trends 10 October 2016 [archived]

Last verified: 16 August 2026. Spotted an error? Suggest an edit (corrections with sources are reviewed and applied).