random-streetview

One call, one random Google Street View panorama.

pip install random-streetview

from random_streetview import random_panorama

pano = random_panorama()

pano.id     # 'ptFCsB5aFyaWDDlpbCliVw'
pano.lon    # 2.2954822
pano.lat    # 48.8583758
pano.url    # 'https://www.google.com/maps/@?api=1&map_action=pano&pano=...'

Panorama is a named tuple, so panoid, lon, lat = random_panorama() works too.

Nothing raises on a network or parsing failure — you get None once the attempts are used up.

Timeouts

random_panorama(max_retry=10, timeout=3.0)   # the defaults

timeout is per request, in seconds, and is raised to 0.5 if you ask for less. A single call budgets at most 30 seconds of timeout across its attempts, so max_retry is an upper bound rather than a promise: at timeout=10.0 you get 3 attempts, not 10. The default pairing is sized to reach all 10. Time actually spent on the wire does not count against the budget — only the timeouts do.

How it works, and why it can break

Picking a coordinate at random mostly lands you in the ocean, so candidates come from randomstreetview.com and wandery.it, which keep lists of places known to have coverage. Each candidate is then resolved to a panorama id through GeoPhotoService.SingleImageSearch, an undocumented internal Google Maps endpoint.

That means no API key — and no guarantees. The scraped sites will change their HTML, and Google can alter or start refusing that endpoint at any time; when that happens this library returns None rather than breaking your program. If you need something dependable, use the official Street View Static API metadata endpoint with a key instead (metadata requests are not billed).

Requests are not rate-limited for you. Space out your calls.

Development

uv sync
uv run pytest    # fully offline; network calls are monkeypatched

License

MIT