Obtaining Google Street images

Finding the location you are interested in

First go to earth.google.co.uk enter a place name or postcode in the search box and tap the Search button. 

You can then click and drag the image to get to the precise location. You can use the zoom controls on the bottom right to zoom in as needed.

You can tap View - Basemap Settings (or tap the small square showing a miniature map/image) to change from, for example, satellite images to a map, and to add shops and other businesses, places of general interest, boundaries and roads etc. Use whatever helps you find the location you are looking for.

Drag the Street View man symbol to a particular position on a road to see historical Street View images. 

Use the cursor to reduce the width of the Street View image, ideally so that it is slightly higher than it is wide, but don't reduce the width so far that the thin grey bar at the bottom (containing the month and year of the image) disappears.

At the top right there will be an oval containing the words "See more dates". If Google in fact has only one image for this location the oval will be greyed out. If Google has more than one image for this location, click on "See more dates" and a bar will appear with thumbnails showing all the historical images available and you can select the one you are interested in.

Once you have the image you want to save a copy of, proceed as follows:

• If there is a thumbnail bar, tap the "collapse" symbol and it will be replaced by an oval showing the month and year of the selected image in blue (you already have the month and year showing in the grey bar at the bottom but having the larger text blue date in the saved copy will make the date more prominent).    

• Tap Print on your browser and select a printer of PDF to create a PDF copy in A4 portrait. You may have to adjust the scale so that the whole screen, including, importantly, the image month and year appears in the print Preview. Then tap OK to create the PDF.

If you are saving more than one image for a street for the same year you should number the images like this:

2018 Google StreetView - King's Bench Walk - image 1.pdf 

2018 Google StreetView - King's Bench Walk - image 2.pdf 

Note 1: Do make sure that the PDF print does include the month and year of the image. Webpage designers, including designers of Google Street View, may design their webpages with a stylesheet so that a slightly different format appears when printing as compared to the screen display - this is typically used to take account of the fact that, for example, a print is divided into pages whereas a screen display is continuous. But sometimes a webpage design is not perfect so that the print not only has a different format but may in certain circumstances omit items such as, this case, the month and year of the image. If you hit this problem, one solution is to save a screenshot rather than doing a print-to-PDF. But before resorting to a screenshot you could try using a different computer. A webpage can be designed to detect the attributes of the computer display - such as its resolution - and to use that information to modify what is displayed (e.g. perhaps using ordinary text where more stylish graphics might be used for a computer display with higher resolution) but, depending how the webpage is written, it might also modify the print stylesheet as well so it is worth trying a print-to-PDF on a different computer to see if that includes month and year before considering resorting to a screenshot.

Note 2: Sometimes Google removes particular historical Street View images. One example (not the only one) of when this may happen is when a road layout changes. So, when you find the image you are looking for, make sure you save it when you find it because if you don't save it then, and you go back to it a month later, there is a risk that particular image might no longer be available. 

Note 3: Street View images are taken by a camera mounted on the Google car or other Google vehicle (a tricycle is used on some narrow routes). Google Earth also gives access to photographs of selected locations contributed by named Google users and uploaded to Google but such photographs do not have the same evidential value as Street View images taken by Google itself because, for example, the month and year shown is generally the month/year they were uploaded which may not be the month/year when they were actually taken, and in some cases they might not even be photographs of the location they are associated with. You can tell that you are looking at a contributed image because it will have the contributor's name, in a oval box, where it would normally say "Google".

Disclaimer

This information page is designed to be used only by clients of John Antell who have entered into an agreement for the provision of legal services. The information in it is necessarily of a general nature and will not be applicable to every case: it is intended to be used only in conjunction with more specific advice to the individual client about the individual case. This information page should not be used by, or relied on, by anyone else.

The information on this page about specific computer techniques is provided for information purposes only. Every reasonable effort has been made to ensure that the information is accurate and up to date at the time it was written but no responsibility for its accuracy, or for any consequences of relying on it, is assumed by me. You should satisfy yourself, before using any of the techniques, software or services described, that the techniques are appropriate for your purposes and that the software or service is reliable.

This page was lasted updated in August 2025 Disclaimer