Streetview scraper v1: cheap, arbitrary sized streetview images
loichovon.comThe risk of getting banned by Google seems pretty catastrophic, so I’d be pretty worried about using this. Even if you use a “burner” Google account, who knows what they could do to link it to your primary account.
no issues yet. I'll update the post if I get in trouble :D
I'm surprised this unauthorized method uses the API at all. Years ago I animated a route with streetview images using crude browser animation and screenshots.
It looks like the V2 [0] is using the web client. Since it is injecting additional JS code in the page, it can/could easily be detected by google.
Say more? I don't understand the technique youre describing and its objective.
I automated clicking the Streetview arrow in a browser and taking a screenshot of a defined region of the screen to create a type of Streetview Hyperlapse. Many other tools have done it better since, at least as far back as 2013: https://tllabs.io/google-street-view-hyperlapse-youtube-vide...
Ahh I see, those hyperlapses look very cool!!
Going back to your first comment, I originally made this as part of an app with an interactive streetview component. I reused the initialization code I had as the base for this. Re-using that code also makes sure the screenshots taken would be close as what you'd see using the embedded streetview (In our project we had a bunch of remote locations without a lot of SV images, so depending on the search radius used when querying for a panorama, we could end up in vastly different places).
However, I realize that I never even considered scraping the public site, which would allow for hiding your identity by not needing an API key. I'll think about this.
Why does this have a cost?
You can get street view images from maps.google.com for free, so a scraper should be able to use the same interface for free (as long as it's either not throttled, or you can get multiple IPs or don't care about speed).
As @mplewis said, because it uses the SV API - however, I've since found a way to reduce that cost to practically 0. See https://loichovon.com/posts/streetview-scraper-v2.html
As you say though, another way to go about this would be to scrape the public SV site, which I have not attempted to do. @xnx linked this project in another comment, which seems to do just that: https://tllabs.io/google-street-view-hyperlapse-youtube-vide...
I don't know if/how they evade captchas.
This project uses the Panorama API. A traditional scraper will quickly run into recaptchas when scraping a Google property.