Who hasn’t seen a Google car passing by? For more than ten years, a fleet of vehicles has been driving through the streets of cities and towns around the world, taking pictures of everything around them and then capturing it on Google Maps, one of the Google services most used daily by pedestrians and drivers.
One of the things that most caught our attention about Google Maps was its Street View function, which consists of viewing a map at street level. By moving a little orange man (Pegman) and using virtual arrows, we can drive along different urban roads and see the facades of buildings, streets, avenues and squares thanks to the images taken by Google vehicles.
Google Street View began in 2007, and today the amount of photographs collected is enormous. They tend to be updated with some frequency, especially in important places and cities. With Google Street View we can see those changes, year by year, through a timeline, a curious and comfortable time travel, without leaving home.
To get started, you have to drag the Pegman, located at the bottom right, to the map itself, and this action will activate the Street View view to scroll through the 360 images of any street, if available.
If a Google vehicle has driven by that particular place, in the floating box at the top left you will see, in addition to the name of the street, city and country, information about the date on which the most recent images were taken, and next to it, an icon in the form of a clock.
By clicking on the clock, you will see a timeline where different dates are highlighted, corresponding to past images of the same location. By clicking on the highlights, you will see the thumbnail of the image, and if we click on the thumbnail image, you will see it in large to navigate through the past.
Depending on the location, there will be more or less, and they will go back more years. The oldest ones are from 2007, the year when Google camera vehicles started to be on the roads.
