In October 2024, we spent the better part of a day walking through Greenlawn Cemetery in Portsmouth, Ohio, camera in hand, taking a photograph every three seconds. Our goal was to document the grounds for Google Street View—a full walkthrough of the cemetery’s paths, markers, and layout. The result was useful, but not without problems. The GPS drift was more noticeable than we hoped, and the image placement wasn’t as accurate as it needed to be. We knew we’d have to revisit it.
This time, we came prepared with a better setup.
Instead of walking, we mounted the Insta360 to the roof of the car and used a much more precise GPS logger that embeds coordinates directly into the 360-degree video. We captured continuous 5.7K footage at 30 frames per second, following a carefully planned route that minimized overlap and preserved usable imagery from the initial walk. The new method should give us a smoother, more accurate “blue line” on Google Street View—one that reflects the cemetery’s true layout more faithfully.
The resulting file was over 29 GB, which isn’t unmanageable, but still took nearly two hours to upload to Street View Studio. Now we wait while Google processes the data and renders the imagery. With any luck, the GPS improvements will reduce the kinds of errors we saw last time.
There are still a few areas we’ll need to revisit. The smaller island-like burial plots—those little “triangles” of graves—are better approached on foot, especially where turnarounds are tight. There’s also a narrow dirt lane that runs parallel to Grant Street. We weren’t able to finish filming it due to a city worker on a broken-down mower, but we’ll return when it’s clear.
This project is slow work, but it’s meaningful. Creating an accurate, accessible visual record of a place like Greenlawn isn’t just about convenience—it’s about preservation. The more precisely we can map these spaces, the better they can be understood, respected, and remembered.
We’ll share another update once the new imagery is live. Until then, thanks for following along.
