Removing clutter from Streetview

In the New Maps, when you are looking around in streetview there are a few boxes, icons, and toolbars on the screen that obscure a bit of the view. Usually it's not a problem, but some people may want to have a full screen view that's very clean. There is no ability within Maps to remove stuff, but modern browsers have some developer tools that are great for customizing a site temporarily.

This post is going to show how to remove content you don't want to look at using the developer tools in Chrome (Firefox is basically the same). The only catch is that it's a temporary fix, the next time you load the page it will all come back again.

So maybe you have a great view of the CN tower, but those pesky boxes are in the way:

Getting rid of all of it is actually pretty easy to do:

1. Click ctrl-shft-i to get the developer tools
2. Click on the magnifying glass icon in the upper left corner of the developer window (square with an arrow in FF)
3. Go to the black location box in the upper left corner and hover over the black area just above the arrow so the entire box turns blue and click on it
4. Go to the developer window and a few lines should be highlighted
5. Right click on the line above it that says <div id="titlecard" jstcache="0"> and choose Delete to remove that box
6. Repeat steps 2-5 for the bottom of the map, but for that one you want to delete the line is about a dozen lines above the highlighted line that says <div class="app-viewcard-strip noprint" jstcache="0">
7. Click on the X in the upper right corner of the developer tools tools to close them

I can't be bothered to take images of the entire process, but if you follow them, the result should look like this:

I use this technique quite a bit when I want to take a screen-capture of something but there are elements I don't want to include. Sometimes you have to experiment a bit to find out what lines to delete to make the specific content go away, but the beauty of this process is that if you mess up you can just reload the page and it all comes back again.