Download high-resolution Google Street View panoramas in the command line

Google Street View has millions of 360° panoramas covering remote remote, interesting places like the Faroe Islands cliffs and the abandoned streets of Pripyat, Ukraine. You can explore these places through your browser, but it’s tough to save high-resolution versions for offline viewing, analysis or creative projects.

I recently developed an open-source tool to help with that. It’s called streetview-dl, and it downloads authorized, full-resolution Street View panoramas directly from Google’s servers.

What it does

Give it a Google Maps Street View URL, and it downloads the complete panorama at maximum resolution. The tool handles the technical details: extracting panorama IDs, fetching image tiles, stitching them together and embedding proper 360° metadata.

streetview-dl "https://www.google.com/maps/@51.4047117,30.0558913,2a..."

This downloads a 13,312×6,656 pixel panorama from Pripyart — the eery, abandoned city near Chernobyl.

Why it’s useful

Street View’s web interface shows compressed previews. The actual panoramas are much higher resolution, often 13K+ pixels wide. These full-resolution images work well for:

• Research and documentation: Capturing places before they change
• Virtual reality projects: 360° images for VR environments
• Creative work: Source material for digital art or photography
• Archival purposes: Preserving views of historically significant locations
• Social media profiles: Showing off your favorite spots on X, Facebook, etc.

Recent additions

The tool started as a basic downloader. Recent versions added:

• Image processing: Apply black-and-white or vintage sepia filters. Adjust brightness, contrast and saturation.
• Framing options: Crop to specific fields of view (100°, 180°, etc.), clip to just the forward or rear half of the panorama or remove the bottom portion to eliminate the car blur.
• Performance: Parallel tile downloads. A high-resolution panorama that took 30+ seconds now downloads in under 5.
• Terminal output: Progress spinners and color-coded status messages.

Examples

Here are some locations I’ve captured with the tool:

Pripyat, Ukraine: Eerie corridors in the abandoned city near Chernobyl

Faroe Islands: Wind-blasted cliffs (these islands famously used sheep with cameras to map remote areas)

Baldwin Hills, Los Angeles: Downtown skyline to Palos Verdes on a clear day

Angkor, Cambodia: Temple complexes with extensive Street View coverage

The same image with the vintage filter applied:

Added a --metadata flag to get more information about the location, in this case the Sixth Street Bridge in Los Angeles:

{
  "pano_id": "FMzH1Jz67oul2Z5qCr8HeA",
  "image_width": 16384,
  "image_height": 8192,
  "tile_width": 512,
  "tile_height": 512,
  "lat": 34.03845788764312,
  "lng": -118.23021023013284,
  "date": "2025-04",
  "copyright_info": "From the Owner, Photo by: Google",
  "url_yaw": 27.82825719012328,
  "url_pitch": 4.938092541030855,
  "links": [
    {
      "panoId": "pm5RCWpFXy_pbX064S_bow",
      "heading": 266.8810729980469,
      "text": "6th St",
      "elevationAboveEgm96": 85.678474
    },
    {
      "panoId": "obWDVb-i9ESev78l-dUTiQ",
      "heading": 86.86795806884766,
      "text": "6th St",
      "elevationAboveEgm96": 86.78699
    }
  ]
}

Getting started

You’ll first need to follow the instructions to get a key for Google’s Map Tiles API. It’s easy to acquire and cheap to use — free for fewer than 100,000 requests a month. Then…

Install via pip:

pip install streetview-dl

Download a panorama:

streetview-dl "https://www.google.com/maps/@latitude,longitude,3a..."

Apply processing:

streetview-dl URL --filter vintage --fov 180 --crop-bottom 0.8

The tool respects Google’s terms of service and includes appropriate rate limiting.

Why the command line?

Browser extensions can’t access the full-resolution tiles due to security restrictions. A dedicated tool can fetch the complete image data that browsers can’t reach.

The command line also makes it easy to batch process multiple locations or integrate into larger workflows.

The tool is open source and available on Github. I hope you find it useful and you’ll considering helping me improve it.