Panoramio was an invaluable location scouting tool for me. I could zoom into an area I wanted to scout, and all these little blips would appear on the map. Each showing me the location from a different view. If I happened to notice a particular cluster in a given area, I could zoom in tighter, and quickly see a bunch of different angles. Quickly determine if it was a tourist spot, or somewhere a little more out of the way.

Now that it’s been merged into Google Maps, that functionality no longer really exists. Sure, it has a strip of images along the bottom of the map and mousing over them shows you where they were shot, but it doesn’t really tell the whole story any more. Photographer Mike Wong must’ve felt this too. He is the creator of a new photo mapping website which shows where all of the images on 500px were created around the globe. At least, the ones with GPS information.

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