Street view of Stockholm

A few years ago I wrote about how some guys drove around in San Francisco, shooting millions of street-level photos with geo-locations. With a bit of Ajax you could explore the city online and maybe even do some window-shopping.

Some months later, Richard Howe took 11 000 photos of Manhattan street corners. There were naturally concerns about personal integrity since the quality of details is very high and there are a lot of people present in the pictures.

The bright minds at Google never sleep and one year ago they presented Google Street View, the best example of this technique so far.

Sunset at Brännkyrkagatan.

Fast forward to present day. This summer the same thing was shot in Stockholm and Swedish location service Hitta released the resulting service Hitta Gatubild a few days ago, covering 1200 km of roads in 360 degrees. It’s easy to navigate the streets by clicking the blue circles.

The image density is impressive with two million photos, one for every seventh meter of the road. However, with this kind of high-quality photos the integrity issue is more real than ever. A blogger found himself in a picture, but the most hilarious find is the car thieves caught in action.