Quote:
Originally Posted by 1stindoor
He had that truck pre-po'd there so as to obscure the view of his lair.
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A quick tip that helps in some cases:
If you're reconing a location in Google Street View and the location you're interesting in is obscured, you can try a few different things:
1. Move up or down the street in street view and adjust the camera angle accordingly. This works great for examples like this, with moving objects like this truck.
2. Use the geolocation features of vast picture collection sites like Flickr, Picasa, and Twitpic. Between these sites, there's a vast amount of location data available. Most smartphones geotag their photos with lat/long by default and users don't even realize it (maybe privacy IS dead
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TinEye.com is also very helpful in some cases. It's a "reverse image search engine". It allows you to upload an image and get back similar (but not necessarily the same) images.
As an aside, I've begun sketching out some ideas in regards to a photo terrain search engine. The idea is to take a photo that contains a mountain/hill/etc, convert the visible bits to a scaled 2D plot and then either query Google's GIS data (unlikely currently, due to the # of lookups we're talking about) or query through a GIS data set downloaded locally. Today's powerful GPUs (video card chips) should make this pretty feasible even on a single modestly-powered consumer PC.
We'll see if I ever actually get anywhere with that. If you have any thoughts or ideas, shoot me a PM. I've derailed this topic enough.