Panoramio, the Google owned location centric photo sharing service is shutting down on November 4. The Panoramio website displays a notification on homepage informing users that the service won’t be available and how users can move their data. Users’ photos will continue to be available for another year but they will no longer be able to add new.
If you are not familiar with Panoramio, it was acquired by Google in 2007 and was contributing to the crowdsourced images on Google Maps and Google Earth. So you have probably benefitted from the service. However, as Google now allows for photo uploads in Google Maps and also introduced the Local Guides program, Panoramio lost its relevance. While it isn’t significantly big when it comes to the size of user base, there is a very strong community of users who love and actively use the platform.
Users aren’t happy with the news of shutdown, something that is clearly visible with the conversations on this forum. Google previously tried to shut down the service in 2014 but the founders of Panoramio launched a petition which triggered angry response from users and stopped Google from killing the service.
When the company decided to continue operating the service, the company promised users to work on an integrated solution to support their content. Now with Local Guides and Google Maps, Google has new platforms to offer them and will transfer the content for users who have already linked their G+ accounts. Time to move ahead and jump on the new big.
