I’m pleased to see that some bits of Etruria and Cliffe Vale have been newly photographed for Google StreetView, at the end of May 2023.

The first re-photographing in a long time, as you can see above. And looking fabulous with it — or as fabulous as the greener bits of inner-city Stoke-on-Trent can look at the end of May. Coverage is a bit patchy at present, but hopefully it’s the start of a new tranche of photography. I’d do it myself, along with litter-picking, but I can’t afford the £500 for an Insta360 X3 camera with GPS (apparently the best and easiest, I hear).

Now, there’s an idea. Every city, each May-June, trusted photographers should be able to borrow an X3 camera for free and go out and build Street View for their city. Cheap, easy, ‘citizen PR’. Although, of course, ideally done after a Dad’s Army of paid-unemployed litter-pickers has swept through the area.

Stokies reading this should note that uploading 360-degree .MP4 or .MOV video (Google prefers 360-video) to help build Google Street View has changed. The long-time Android creation/uploading app has gone, and it seems you now do it through the Street View Studio website. Although it seems you can also do it direct from an X3 camera, which I’m told recently had a firmware update to enable more fine-grained GPS metadata. Older buyers should beware that the user needs to also own a smartphone (ugh!), to ‘activate’ the X3 camera for the first time via an ‘app’ — this may be a deal-breaker.