Overview
What Every Building makes, the three stages it takes, and what you need before you start.
Every Building turns a street into one long, flat photograph of its facades: every building along it, side by side, without perspective. It does this in your browser, from Google Photorealistic 3D Tiles.
Home, Tool, Guide
The bar at the top of every page has three sections. Home shows streets made with the tool. Tool is the tool itself. Guide is what you are reading.
You can move between them while you work. The tool stays as you left it, and a stitch that is running keeps running; a dot on Tool marks it. A running capture is the exception: leaving the Capture stage stops it, and the tool asks first.
Three stages
A street goes through three stages, in this order. They are the last three items on the rail at the left edge of the tool.
- Plan. Choose a road and the blocks beside it. The result is a path.
- Capture. A camera travels along the path and takes a grid of overlapping, perspective-free shots.
- Stitch. The shots are joined into panels, every seam is checked, and the panels are downloaded.
The first item on the rail, Library, lists every path you have made and the captures of each.
How the pieces relate
- A region is an area the tool has street and block data for.
- A path belongs to a region. It is the thing you edit, and it saves itself.
- A path can have many captures. Starting a capture freezes the path and the camera settings as they are at that moment.
- A complete capture can be stitched into one print: its panels.
Where your work is kept
Paths and captured images are stored in the browser you made them in, at the address you used. Nothing is uploaded: there is no server and no account.
What you need
- A recent desktop browser. Capture draws with WebGL, and stitching needs OffscreenCanvas. Chrome and Edge can write a large export straight to disk; other browsers have to hold it in memory first.
- For Capture only: your own Google Maps API key with the Map Tiles API enabled. Planning and stitching do not use it. See API key and cost.
Regions
The tool ships with Manhattan. A build can also include Greater Boston. The region is chosen in the top bar of the tool, on Library and Plan. See Regions, data and credits.