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(Updated) A new Google Street View update happened

A Google Street View update happened! Here is a quick look.

Update 2021/09/28: Google applied the new blue lines back and it is a disaster: not only the broken blue lines are still here but Vietnam is now removed. The “new” Germany coverage is also removed along with all the small bits of coverage going into countries without Street View. The only good point is South Korea keeping its coverage. In the end this is one of the most broken updates ever…


Update 2021/09/22: People started reporting imagery from September being available on Street View. This is the first time we see pictures less than one month old being published the same month. However the update is still in a weird state with new blue lines not visible yet and the API unable to interact with new data. It is possible that Google will re-publish this update later and this day will be used as the official date for this update.


Update 2021/09/14: The update is quite broken and Google reverted the changes on the blue line layer. This means South Korea is back, along with many broken / removed coverage such as the gen 4 Switzerland pictures. However the new blue lines are now removed even if the coverage still exists (including Germany). Gen 1 Japan coverage is also still there.


Friday (2021/09/10) Google released a new update on Street View. As usual a complete report will be done to list all the new and updated coverage that has been found on our Discord server. Here is a summary:

This update brings a few new coverage notably in Ceuta, the Spanish enclave in northern Africa. This is also the first time a gen 4 coverage is published in Africa. Indonesia, Sri Lanka, Canada, Mexico, Argentina and more places also received coverage in new areas. Dhaka in Bangladesh also got an update, unfortunately it was done with a low-quality camera (like Alaska in 2019).

Germany also has new covered roads, surprisingly. It is mostly on autobahns with footage from 2008-2010 (like in the covered cities). Some regular roads and a few towns can also be viewed, without any blurred buildings. It is unknown if this is intended or a mistake from Google but it is possible that this is a test to gauge the reactions from Germans as Google does want to publish Street View there.

Another notable addition is the very first coverage of Japan, all in blurry gen 1. This coverage was removed by Google as the cameras were too high and it is unknown if this publication is intended or not. Enjoy it while you can as it could be removed at some point!

Updates happened in many countries, with many pictures taken last month. This is the fastest published coverage we ever saw at a large scale! Google is clearly speeding up its pipeline to allow quick publication of pictures. We can now find gen 4 coverage in Alaska, Madeira, Azores, northwestern Argentina, Sri Lanka, larger parts of Bulgaria and Sweden and many more. San Marino and Luxembourg got new pictures too but mostly from 2013/2015, Luxembourg only having updates in a few places (one being gen 4 2019 coverage).

Unfortunately this update came with many technical problems. Many blue lines are now broken all around the World. This is not the first time a broken update happens and we need to wait for Google to make corrections. This also means we have to wait for this before checking for the new blue lines as some may be invisible. This will delay the creation of the report for a few days or weeks.

Technical problems are not the only bad aspect of this update. Switzerland lost almost all of its new gen 4 coverage that was introduced in the previous update. The country is almost back to 2014. The whole coverage of South Korea is now missing. Actually the coverage is still available, only the blue lines are gone. Footage can still be accessed by clicking roads, zooming on them with the satellite view and globe view (3D view) enabled or through the Maps API. Some parts of Seoul or Busan seem to be gone however. It is unknown if this is intended or an issue that will (or will not) be fixed by Google but, if a fix is done, maybe the full coverage of the country will finally appear.

As usual no new country was covered in this update, like in the past years.

That’s it for this news! When the complete report will be ready we will post another news to inform you. Thank you for reading!