Is there a way to get streetside static image of front of house with only latitude longitude?

Question

This seems like a long shot but I'll ask anyway. Is there a way to specify latitude longitude coordinates or even an address in the static image request and get back a street side image of the front of the house/property? I know you can specify pitch and heading but I will not have these data points at the time of making the request.

The example request below is by default oriented towards the street.

https://dev.virtualearth.net/REST/V1/Imagery/Map/Streetside/33.593697, -112.207367?mapSize=757,491&zoomLevel=1&key={BingMapsKey}

The only reason I thought this might be in the realm of possibilities is because when I search the latitude longitude coordinates or the address in Bing's search, and click on the streetside image, it correctly orientates to the front of the house.

Answer 1

When you issue a geocoding request for an address, you should get back 2 points: One is a routable point which should be on the road, the other is the rooftop point which should be on the house itself. You should be able to calculate a heading from these two points, and request a streetside image from the routable point with the heading you calculated.

If you only have a lat/long and not an address, you may be able to use the location intelligence service to discover nearby addresses.

Answer 2

I just took a look at the Bing geocode response and it does indeed return a "Display" (rooftop) value and a "Route" (street) value. From there I was able to calculate a heading. 

Unfortunately in production we are using Google for the geocode and Bing for the map/image generation. Google's response does not return rooftop and street coordinates. For now I will have to abandon the effort unless there is some way to have the streetside image request look up the heading value at the time the request is made.

Answer 3

I am afraid we are not the experts on getting directional info from Google but a quick search indicates a "Viewport" option on location_type = ROOFTOP you might check out.  Otherwise it should be very easy to switch from the Google Geocoder to the Bing Geocoder  :) .

Answer 4

Yeah it would be nice to do everything from just Bing.

In the google response I see what looks to be the rooftop coordinates and then two sets of coordinates as "viewport" and "bounds" which I believe are just bounding box coordinates.

        <geometry>

            <location>

                <lat>33.6567276</lat>

                <lng>-112.0348489</lng>

            </location>

            <location_type>ROOFTOP</location_type>

            <viewport>

                <southwest>

                    <lat>33.6554037</lat>

                    <lng>-112.0362419</lng>

                </southwest>

                <northeast>

                    <lat>33.6581017</lat>

                    <lng>-112.0335440</lng>

                </northeast>

            </viewport>

            <bounds>

                <southwest>

                    <lat>33.6566398</lat>

                    <lng>-112.0350284</lng>

                </southwest>

                <northeast>

                    <lat>33.6568656</lat>

                    <lng>-112.0347575</lng>

                </northeast>

            </bounds>

        </geometry>

Answer 5

I can only repeat that I don't have insight into Google's solution but I would guess the viewport would be something different than bounds or why would they have both?