Panoramio was started in the summer of 2005 by Spanish entrepreneurs Joaquín Cuenca Abela and Eduardo Manchón Aguilar.

Achieving this balance can be a challenge, especially when publishing tools are managed under separate products, such as Panoramio, Views, Google+ and Google Maps.

So today, after listening to community feedback about the future of the platform, we're pleased to let you know that there won't be any immediate changes to Panoramio.

Instead of aligning the community with Views, we've gone back to the drawing board to work on a more integrated solution that supports you and your content directly within Google Maps.

Thanks for your input, and for your patience in the year ahead.On January 30, 2016 another petition was launched by Stuart Smith, a Panoramio user from Australia, to request Google to maintain the site.

[citation needed] Despite the continuing popularity of the site and both petitions, Google announced on October 5, 2016[24][25] that they had decided to close Panoramio on November 4, 2016.

Images judged to be too creative or artistic in concept, such as Photoshop constructions, were also excluded from Google Earth regardless of other requirements met.

However a pervasive problem was thousands of misplaced photos, typically manifested by cities and towns seemingly located in the oceans, which required action on the part of the photographer before anything could be done.

[30] Third party developers released a Windows Phone 7 version of Panoramio[31] that allowed users to browse through the various images posted to www.panoramio.com.

[32][33] Data published in Panoramio has been used by scientists, local and governmental authorities as a proxy for the evaluation of aesthetic values, the appreciation of different landscape types and identifying frequently photographed locations.