I’ve been contributing photosphere images to Google Maps ever since the Google Nexus phones. The ability to post a photosphere was baked into the Photo’s app on Android and also through Google Maps itself. This was great as you could upload a 360 photo at a given co-ordinate. Google Maps users could drop the little stick man on a blue dot and view the 360 photo. Fast forward a few years (I can’t remember exactly when) and it seemed as though Google want to push people to uploading images under the umbrella of a “place”, rather than a co-ordinate. I can understand from their perspective they don’t want blue dots all over the map, rather to have images placed under a “place”. The problem with that is there are some circumstances where the place is too big an area – such as a National Park – my picture could be taken miles away from the “place” located on Google Maps.

Now, for a few years there was a solution to this. An official solution, in fact. You could import your picture into the Google Street View app and upload it from there.. until the app was recently sunsetted by Google.

So, imagine my disappointment when all of this was taken away – I had to find a solution.

Enter PhotoSphereStudio – https://maps.moomoo.me

I found this while Googling the subject (from this reddit post)

You simply sign-in to your Google account, upload your photosphere image and upload. Wait a few minutes for the image to appear on Google Maps and your done. Simple! Though the one thing I noticed is the title of the image was something like “Unknown location” as it was not associated to a place – but thankfully the developers of this application have solved this – simply go to the advanced options at the bottom of the page and enter the placeId yourself (there’s a link to search for it). And just like that you can upload photosphere images to Google Maps the classic way.