Day 18 of the @quiztime Advent Calendar: I present you alternatives for Google Street View. As of today Street View covers most countries in the Americas and Europe. However, there are still big gaps in Asia and Africa, but also in Germany.

Moreover, there might be some "time gaps" when you're chronolocating (e.g. you need an image from 2016 but the most recent image is from 2015). For more detailed information about Google Street View coverage, see: https://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/File:Google_Street_View_coverage.svg

It can save you a lot of time when ground-level imagery is available and it can be highly important when trying to chronolocate smth. So here's a overview of some of the alternatives.

I will start with Yandex http://yandex.com/maps . Obviously its "Panoramas" cover most of Russia's regional centers. It also covers some cities in, Belarus, Uzbekistan, Kazakhstan, Ukraine, Turkey and Yerevan (Armenia). The dates of the imagery varies per country/city

Bing Maps has "Streetside", it covers most of the US and UK and some places in France and Spain. I'm not a fan, however. It seems like it's getting worse and the Streedside icon sometimes inexplicably disappears.

Also, I think the coverage in France decreased compared to 2016 (I might be wrong though). The images seem to be a bit outdated in even major cities like NY, as well (read: imagery from 2014). See link: https://answers.microsoft.com/en-us/bing/forum/bing_maps-bing_dir-bing_appdev_pcmac/so-is-streetside-dead/c1c21c39-c5d3-41dc-85a3-4a08b988912f

Mapillary: not panoramic footage, but dashcam footage. It is crowdsourced so it relies on volunteers. The good thing is you can add imagery yourself if you wish. Coverage varies greatly. https://www.mapillary.com/  Two examples, Google coverage vs Mapillary in Baku and Magdeburg

OpenStreetCam - very similar to Mapillary, also crowdsourced and it also allows you to share dashcam footage taken from your phone. Here old imagery from Google in Berlin vs OpStrCam http://openstreetcam.org/ 

If you are interested in a specific country I advise you to check this list on Wikipedia (although some might not be available any longer. E.g. I think Cyclomedia isn't free anymore): https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_street_view_services

Some examples:
http://carte.ma/  - some Moroccan cities
https://mapy.cz/  - Czechia
https://map.kakao.com/  - S. Korea
https://en.mappy.com/  - Some cities in France
https://gjirafa.biz/  - some Albania - big part of Kosovo
https://map.baidu.com/  - China

One of my favorites is the Istanbul Municipality's mapping service, they even have a tool to calculate height (not sure how accurate it is, but maybe an idea for @googlemaps? I think it can help us with chronolocation ) https://sehirharitasi.ibb.gov.tr/ 

If you are investigating a station or smth near a train track, this website has train "dashcam" footage (for the lack of a better description). h/t: @Sector035

The above are examples of services that are dedicated to mapping and panoramic images/videos. But you don't need to limit yourselves to these sites. YouTube and Facebook can be good sources for this as well.

YouTube: Say we want to find recent videos from Casablanca, Morocco. We can search for "Casablanca" in YT and select some filters. In this example, I selected long videos and 360 degree ones (to create a bit of a Street View vibe).

It doesn't need to be a 360 video though. You can also select the 4k filter instead (there are lots of people filming their walk through town and often the videos they upload are very high quality). You could also add the keyword "walk" or "drive" instead.

If you need footage from a specific date, it'll be a challenge searching for it on YT. Instead you can use Google advanced search: site: http://youtube.com  times square 360 after:2019-01-01 before:2019-12-31

in the example above I used a filter for the length of the video (long) and the quality (high) as such videos are, more often than not, high quality and long. Also because such videos are usually more useful for our use cases.

You can do the same with FB. You go to FB and type the place name you're interested in, e.g. "Alexanderplatz", then select videos. Optionally you can select a date filter, I selected "This week". I found diff videos uploaded by diff accounts of the same street artists.

Now if you want to find videos from a very specific date range, it'll be difficult to do it on FB. For that I normally use this site: https://sowdust.github.io/fb-search/ 

Using it can be a bit confusing at first, though. If you want to learn more about it, read this blogpost by @technisette on http://osintcurio.us  https://osintcurio.us/2019/08/22/the-new-facebook-graph-search-part-1/

For our example I'm going to look for videos from Vaclavske namesti, Prague from Oct, 2020. (Unfortunately the "live videos" filter isn't working. This only works when you do the search from within FB. But this will return live videos as well as videos that were uploaded later

I select the first video and I get a nice replacement for the Google Street View.

There are some caveats with this, if it isn't a live video then it wasn't necessarily uploaded on the same date as it was filmed. So if you are using it for geolocation, be careful! Each platform has its own "uniqueness". E.g. Yandex gives the year but not the date of a panorama.

whereas Google Street View gives the month, Bing even gives the exact date etc.

Anyway, I hope this little overview was useful. Do you know of any other sites providing a street view like service? Please do share your knowledge with us under this thread. The thing that makes this community great is the knowledge sharing among peers.