I may have mentioned this tool in a previous thread, but I find it so helpful that I think it deserves a thread of its own.

Have you ever had an address in Paris and wondered what the corresponding building looks like?

http://photosvilles.wanadoo.fr

This site allows you to type in the number and the street name for most addresses in Paris and will display one or more photos of the building. At the bottom of the photo is an icon that lets you take a "virtual tour" of the immediate neighborhood, i.e. by navigating with the arrows you can move up or down or across the street and display pictures of those buildings as well.

Photos are also available for addresses in:

Lille, Nantes, Strasbourg, Lyon, Bordeaux, Toulouse, Marseille and Nice.

Edit to add: Use the "Rechercher une rue" function to type in the number and street name and use the pull down menu to specify the city (default is Paris).

The "clickable" green map of France below this does not seem to work very well.

[This message has been edited by blairvanhorn (edited 09-24-2002).]

Blair...:

I use this one: http://194.98.134.82/
Ismap - it also shows hotels etc. nearby.
It might be the same map-system with another "shell".

No, it's not the same - yours is very nice because it lists nearby businesses for a given address.

But it doesn't show photos of the actual building or the ones immedaitely around it.

merci beaucoup!

http://www.flyertalk.com/travel/fttravel_forum/thumbsup.gif http://www.flyertalk.com/travel/fttravel_forum/thumbsup.gif http://www.flyertalk.com/travel/fttravel_forum/thumbsup.gif Cool! That's definately going in the bookmarks.

I wish other towns had a similar website.

Michelin has plenty of maps for European cities

http://www.viamichelin.com/viamichelin/gbr/dyn/controller/HomePage

That is AMAZING!!! How fun to revisit the old streets and schools...

Very cool. Thanks Blair.

I found this aeriel views for Germany and Balearic Islands.

http://www.traveltainment.de/index_en.html

<font face="Verdana, Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif" size="2">From Chimney Pot to Loge, a Virtual Close-Up of Paris
By KRISTEN HINMAN

PARIS -- IN case there was any doubt, the streets of Paris are photogenic. Isabel Mendes, a young Brazilian photographer, can attest to it.

For six hours every day, Ms. Mendes inches along the streets of the city's 20 districts, or arrondissements, snapping some 200 pictures of facades. Recently she was taking full-view shots of numbers 185 and 183 Rue Saint Charles in the 15th arrondissement. At number 181 on the corner, she snapped three different angles to capture that building's great girth.

After jotting some notes and marking the sites on a map, she moved on to the next block, hugging her hefty digital camera, a Nikon E3 with a 20-millimeter lens.

"People think I'm a tourist and start teasing me in English," Ms. Mendes said. "But I'm just doing my job."

Ms. Mendes works for Wanadoo Maps, a small company that creates digital photographic and cartographic indexes - pictorial Yellow Pages - of every listed address in major French and Spanish cities. She is one of 55 photographers who are capturing or updating exhaustive pictorial records of European cities.

The fifth edition of the Wanadoo Maps index of Paris will appear soon at France Télécom's Yellow Pages site, Pages Jaunes (www.pagesjaunes.fr).

There, users can view photos and maps by clicking on "Photos de Villes" and entering a street address, or by searching by business name in Pages Jaunes and selecting "photo" (or "plan" for map) when the address pops up. (For an English version of Pages Jaunes, users can click on the Union Jack in the upper right corner of the main Web page.)

Beginning with Paris, Wanadoo Maps has indexed 11 cities since 1998, including Marseille, Bordeaux, Madrid and Barcelona. (The Spanish cities are available from QDQ Media at www.qdq.com.) (http://www.qdq.com.)) By the end of this year Wanadoo will also have finished projects in Rennes and Grenoble in France and Seville and Valencia in Spain.</font>

NY Times (http://www.nytimes.com/2003/04/03/technology/circuits/03pari.html?ex=1050799414&ei=1&en=fd38a86a46a716f8), April 3 2003

This is a wonderful tool. I love it!

Blair, Thanks for this amazing tool. It was great for looking at the outside of our rental and for helping us to recognize it upon arrival.

Also try www.pagesjeunes.fr
There is a small flag to convert to English. This is the yellow pages. It shows maps and photos. You can also request nearby reastaurants etc.
Great tool thanks to Fodor's.

Also try www.pagesjeunes.fr
There is a small flag to convert to English. This is the yellow pages. It shows maps and photos. You can also request nearby reastaurants etc.
Great tool thanks to Fodor's.

It is
http://www.pagesjaunes.fr/

But the mentioned link works, you are redirected though !

Thank you for the kind correction.

It is
http://www.pagesjaunes.fr/

But the mentioned link works, you are redirected though !

I love that site - just amazing!