If you’ve taken the Google for the Wise Genealogist course you are probably familiar with the mapping/image website Panoramio. Panoramio was a great mapping website for finding images of places and events. Unfortunately, like many great Google products it is closing.

Recently, Google sent out an email to those using Panoramio. It reads in part:

Back in 2014, we announced our intention to retire Panoramio in order to invest our efforts into improving photo-sharing experiences directly inside Google Maps. In response to your feedback, we postponed these plans and worked to add features to Maps that better support the level of engagement that you have enjoyed with Panoramio. Today, with photo upload tools in Google Maps and our Local Guides program, we are providing easy options for you to share your photos with an active and growing community. As such, we’ve decided to now close down Panoramio. To make this transition easier, we’ll provide several options to continue sharing photos through other services. If you choose, you can also export all your data and take it somewhere else.

So, what does this mean if you have an account on Panoramio? Panoramio will be closed in November so you can choose to close your account or if you do nothing and have a Google Account, all photos will be migrated to a Google Photo Archive.

Make sure that if you have added photos to Panoramio you download them. Also, go to Panoramio to learn more about this closure. You should have also received an email from Google that explains the closure and other products that take the place of Panoramio.