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by devit 876 days ago
Why does this have a cost?

You can get street view images from maps.google.com for free, so a scraper should be able to use the same interface for free (as long as it's either not throttled, or you can get multiple IPs or don't care about speed).
2 comments
efishnc 874 days ago
As @mplewis said, because it uses the SV API - however, I've since found a way to reduce that cost to practically 0. See https://loichovon.com/posts/streetview-scraper-v2.html

As you say though, another way to go about this would be to scrape the public SV site, which I have not attempted to do. @xnx linked this project in another comment, which seems to do just that: https://tllabs.io/google-street-view-hyperlapse-youtube-vide...

I don't know if/how they evade captchas.

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mplewis 876 days ago
This project uses the Panorama API. A traditional scraper will quickly run into recaptchas when scraping a Google property.
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