Google Street View is not your virtual tour

Publish your panoramas to Street View and they appear in Google Maps, served by Google, inside Google’s interface, at no ongoing cost to you. That is genuinely valuable and we sell it — €10 per panorama published, and you choose which ones go. What it is not is your tour. It carries none of your branding, none of your information popups, none of your room names, no floor plan and none of your own analytics, and it is displayed by a product whose features change over time. The right answer is both. The order matters: the folder is the asset, Street View is distribution.

What Street View publication actually is

Where it lives

In Google Maps. Your visitor reaches it through Google’s interface, using Google’s controls, alongside whatever else Google chooses to show at that location — including your competitors.

Who serves it

Google. The uptime is better than yours and better than ours, it costs nothing to keep online, and it does not depend on anybody renewing anything. This is the real argument for it and it should not be waved away.

What you keep

Your rights in the photographs. Google’s terms of service, effective 30 July 2026, state that your content remains yours and that you retain the intellectual property rights in it. You grant Google a worldwide, non-exclusive, royalty-free licence to host, reproduce, distribute and adapt it — reformatting and the like — for as long as it is protected.

What you can undo

Google’s Maps help states that you can change or delete Street View photos you uploaded at any time. So this is not a one-way door, which is a point in Street View’s favour and one the argument against it usually gets wrong.

What it is not

A file on your disk, an interface you control, or a place to put a floor plan, a menu, a room number, a price list, a booking link or a route through a building.

The counter-argument, stated properly rather than dismissed

The strongest case for Street View — and you will hear it in this market — is that publication by Google is permanent, and is not sitting on a server that can fall over. Half of that is true, and it is the better half. Google’s serving is more reliable than any hosting you or we would arrange, it survives your web agency, your card expiring and your own IT, and it costs nothing to keep. Any argument for owning your files that pretends otherwise is not worth reading.

The other half does not hold, and the reason has nothing to do with Google’s reliability: features inside a product change, and what you published changes with them. Google no longer supports Photo Paths, and new ones cannot be published to Maps. That is not a criticism — every product retires things, and ours would too if we ran one. It is the point. What is durable is your rights in the imagery and Google’s serving of it in whatever form the product currently takes. What is not durable is the presentation, and the presentation is most of what a tour is.

The same panoramas, published two ways

What we sell, and what we will not claim

Publishing to Street View is on the rate card at €10 per panorama published. It is deliberately priced per panorama rather than per tour, because it is rarely all of them and charging for all of them would be charging for work nobody wants done. A hotel usually wants the approach, the lobby, the restaurant and one view. A restaurant usually wants the frontage and the room. A handful of panoramas out of a whole tour is the normal shape of this order, and we have not counted the archive for it, so treat that as our impression rather than a figure.

How the two work together

1. Shoot once. The panoramas that go to Street View are the same ones the tour is built from, captured on the same visit, so publishing costs a fraction of what a separate job would.
2. Build the tour: room names, information popups, routes, a floor plan if the building needs one, your logo, your links, your booking page.
3. Choose which panoramas go to Maps. Usually the approach and the two or three spaces that make somebody want to come in — not the corridors, not the back of house.
4. Make sure the profile carrying that imagery also carries your website address, so somebody arriving through Maps has one obvious step to the thing you actually control.

When Street View on its own is enough

For a small shop on a street where the whole decision is “is this the kind of place I want to walk into”, Street View and a set of good photographs may be all you need, and €160 spent on a tour nobody opens is €160 badly spent. We would rather say that here than after you have paid for one. The case for a tour begins where the building has interior structure a passer-by cannot infer:

• Rooms that differ from one another and are sold at different prices — which is every hotel, and the reason hotel tours name stations by room number rather than by room type.
• A building somebody has to navigate rather than glance at: a campus, a clinic, a large venue, a site with more than one entrance.
• Anything that needs explaining while you are standing in it — a lab, an exhibit, a menu, a specification, an access route.
• Any case where the visitor is deciding from another country, which is most of the property market here and is why the tours are the argument rather than the photographs.

If you want both, say so when you write in: send the address and roughly which spaces matter and we will come back with a station count, the panoramas worth publishing and a fixed price. If you want to see what the second column of the table above looks like in practice, the published tours are open in a browser with nothing in front of them.