How to know if street view panorama is indoors or outdoors

Question

Today more and more businesses use street view to show apartments from indoors.

My program supplies ability to show street view according to selected business. But I

Answer 1

I can't seem to find any formal API for this (maybe in the future they will implement one), and I don't think that you can be sure that indoor tiles will be with empty description.

What I found to be working for me is using this API: Run an HTTP GET to this address: "http://cbk0.google.com/cbk?output=xml&ll=52.358445,4.88103" with the ll=LONG,LAT

This is an internal API used to find a target location pano_id. It also gives us some information on what we can do with it: zoom levels, what streets you're on, etc.

I've noticed that all the results for coordinates that have indoor street view images, have scene="_number" level_id="_id" in the data_properties tag of the panorama. And so, for each location you can run this request and look for these values in the data_properties of the result XML

some examples:

indoors:
http://cbk0.google.com/cbk?output=xml&ll=52.358445,4.88103
http://maps.google.com/cbk?output=xml&ll=32.051626,34.7613

outdoors:
http://cbk0.google.com/cbk?output=xml&ll=52.358766,4.880494
http://maps.google.com/cbk?output=xml&ll=32.07782,34.785789

Source: Hacking google street view

Update

It seems that to get local businesses right pano_id you need to add &it=all to the request example:

http://cbk0.google.com/cbk?output=xml&hl=x-local&ll=34.058593,-118.240673&it=all

this the the right pano_id for this place, you can verify it using this API

http://cbk0.google.com/cbk?output=tile&panoid=70o9Pukc2KSjO-PfeHussw&zoom=3&x=5&y=1

Answer 2

The ability to filter out indoor street view panoramas was implemented in Google Maps JavaScript API some time ago.

You can use StreetViewService to search only outdoor panoramas. In the request you should specify the source as outdoor

https://developers.google.com/maps/documentation/javascript/reference/3/#StreetViewSource

Have a look at the following sample code that demonstrates how to get only outdoor panoramas

var panorama;
function initialize() {
    var svService = new google.maps.StreetViewService();
    var panoRequest = {
        location: new google.maps.LatLng(37.800953,-122.436738),
        preference: google.maps.StreetViewPreference.NEAREST,
        radius: 50,
        source: google.maps.StreetViewSource.OUTDOOR
    };

    svService.getPanorama(panoRequest, function(panoData, status){
        if (status === google.maps.StreetViewStatus.OK) {
            panorama = new google.maps.StreetViewPanorama(
                document.getElementById('street-view'),
                {
                    pano: panoData.location.pano,
                    pov: {
                        heading: 10,
                        pitch: 10
                    }
                });
        } else {
            //Handle other statuses here
        }
    });
}

html, body {
  height: 100%;
  margin: 0;
  padding: 0;
}
#street-view {
  height: 100%;
}

<div id="street-view"></div>
<script async defer
         src="https://maps.googleapis.com/maps/api/js?key=AIzaSyDztlrk_3CnzGHo7CFvLFqE_2bUKEq1JEU&callback=initialize">
    </script>

I hope this helps!

Answer 3

Here's a feature request I filed with Google:
"Option to disable indoor street views"
https://code.google.com/p/gmaps-api-issues/issues/detail?id=4831

Feel free to star the ticket there to help it get some attention

(Is this OK etiquette-wise? ...not a real answer (yet), but seems worthy of sharing here so interested parties can star/track the ticket)