I’ve been using mapillary for a while now for a few different projects and thought I’d share some of my experiences of using it. Before I start, I’ve no affiliation with Mapillary, I’m just a fan of it!

What is Mapillary?

“Crowdsourced street level photos… Using simple tools like smartphones or action cameras anyone can collect photos that are combined into a street level photo view.” For the average user, this means a street view that we can use to edit OSM, with added functionality like auto-detection of road signs to help things.

Mapillary is a core function of the OpenStreetMap iD editor

Open an iD editor page and click on ‘Map Data’ from the right hand menu (Shortcut: F) and select Mapillary photo overlay. For mapathon usage, Mapillary will help show people what roads, buildings and features look like in a particular area and hopefully provide some context to the aerial images they are mapping from. Sure, you probably won’t be lucky enough to have photos exactly of the area you’re looking at, but you’ve gotta start somewhere!

How?

In all of my uses so far, I’ve used a Garmin Virb Elite to capture images and the manual uploader on mapillary’s website. There’s a blog on how to here. The easier way to do it (although my phone is too old and I can’t download it!) is to use the mapillary app which has loads of function in there to help create your street level photos. Take a photo(s) on your phone, upload it to Mapillary later on when you get some wifi.

Uses so far

Humanitarian uses

The first project I put Mapillary to use for was in Zimbabwe with the Missing Maps Project. Using a Garmin Virb Elite on loan from the British Red Cross, I took around 15,000 photos during the 2 weeks that we were mapping there (part of this time was spent in Epworth, part in Dzivarasekwa). The use of Mapillary in Zimbabwe is pretty obvious; there’s no Street View coverage here and having it enables people to verify what’s on the map using the images. The American Red Cross have also used Mapillary for a project in Haiti, and there’s a Missing Maps Project using it right now in Bangladesh.

In London

Coverage of Google Street View is pretty comprehensive in London (and across most western countries, bar places like Austria and Germany who opposed it), so why do we need Mapillary? Well, there’s plenty of reasons. Mapillary serves as a good place for people to store their geotagged photos, which I know some keen mappers use to improve OSM. With the automatic recognition of roads signs, improving details like turn restrictions, no entries and speed limits is far easier. There are also plenty of places where Street View doesn’t exist in London, but would be useful to have coverage for – tow paths; cycle lanes/alleys etc. I got myself a handlebar mount for my Garmin to attach it to my bike, and off i went. There’s also a growing number of organisations opening up there imagery to Mapillary, including the City of Greater Geelong here with 1,362,869 and the state of Victoria here with 3,276,086 images, both in Australia. Hopefully this can be replicated elsewhere!

Random

I’ve recently been on a white water kayaking holiday in the Austrian Tirol region, and used my Garmin Virb Elite to document the rivers and roads there. My thinking is that at some point, these images could help to form a more detailed kayak guidebook or be used to show different river levels and how things change. I’m still in two minds as to whether having a detailed river level view is a great thing (does it detract from the adventure?!), but given the availability of GoPro footage on most rivers now it’s not really much of a concern.

Summary

Go and use it! Either start taking photos, or turn on the photo overlay the next time you use iD. The new release of the ScoutSigns JOSM plugin from Telenav has intergrated Mapillary function, and I think the ball is rolling for further JOSM integration in the future (feel free to comment if this is/isn’t the case).