GooGrab

Google is one hell of a player on the IT market, with many revolutionary products and services that are difficult to ignore, but there’s no use in trying. Amongst others, Google managed to map out the entire Earth and release it to the public in a virtual form, and GooGrab comes as an easy method of saving pictures of places you visit this way.

First of all, you don’t even have to go through a setup process, because this little application can run right after you download it, making possible to even carry it around on a USB Flash drive. This is a good thing, considering your computer’s health status remains intact, since registries are not tampered with.

All features are wrapped around in a rather poor design because of its old-school style. It doesn’t have any kind of impact on accommodation and practicality, quite the opposite, makes them a bit easier to reach. The upper toolbar holds all functions and values you can mess with, while the rest of the space uses the interactive Google Maps as a display.

One of the first things you want to do is set up the save path for downloaded images, because there’s no button to take you there, and it doesn’t open automatically. Sadly, you need to manually write down the path, or copy it from a location of your choice.

The map is fully interactive and lets you zoom to different levels. It’s also possible to enter Street View and walk the streets of big cities. Coordinates can be introduced to instantly jump to a specific location. It would have been useful to see a built-in search engine to quickly go to locations of interest. Another missing thing is the possibility to rotate the map, which is rather frustrating at zoom level 18, because of the 45 degrees angle view.

Output image formats only count as JPG, PNG, and BMP, but suffice for most activities. Pressing the Save Image button captures the exact view, even with detail pop-ups when clicking locations.

You don’t need a solid purpose to keep GooGrab on your computer. Although it’s not that polished in terms of design, it performs well and can be easily used to provide location details, or simply travel the world in a virtual environment and take one-click pictures of interesting places, as a way to pass time, or simply to find out more about the world you too are a part of.