When Google Earth started off, they relied on crowdsourced imagery to populate the database. This allowed common people to click pictures of their locations and send them to Google who uploaded these images to Panoramio and every time you logged into Google Earth and navigated to a place, the Panoramio platform was responsible for showing you the relevant images. The platform was growing in popularity and had garnered a huge contributor and user base since its introduction in 2007, and it looked like this was the way to go for the Google Earth application going forward. However, Google decided otherwise and started preparing their own photo sharing solution for both, Google Maps and the Google Earth platforms.
The first step in this process was to create the mobile applications for the two platforms, which they did, and to top it all off, they introduced something they called ‘Local Guides Program’. This way, anyone with a Google account could sign up for this program and start contributing photos of their locations directly into the mobile apps. Over time, Google introduced perks and rankings for the guides, making it a bit of a gamified experience, and this only resulted in more users joining and contributing their images.
