Since I am not too satisfied with the quality of mobile phone cameras and especially not with mine today I tried a different way to make good images for mapillary.

I used:

• Sony DSC-RX100 III (Mark II and IV should do also)
• any Smartphone with WLAN
• this free time lapse app from F-Droid | [Google play store] (https://play.google.com/store/apps/details?id=com.thibaudperso.sonycamera) | repo on Github

Now: Connect the app with the camera, set the interval to 1 second¹, start and collect images. The images are stored on the SD card of the camera.
Also record a GPS log since this solution doesn’t store coordinates in the images.
When done walking geotag the images and the images to mapillary. The most comfortable way should be the upload script provided by mapillary.

The only problem is the sheer size of the images. Recording in best quality results in up to 20MB per image. After a short and speedy 3 km walk I had 731 images of 8.3 GB size.
Recording not as L (20MP) but in M (10MP) or S (5MP) should help here, especially since the maximum image size one gets back from mapillary is only 2,048 × 1,365 at the moment.

Result: dismantled overgrown railway track

PS: Since I got asked: I just held the camera with one hand in front of me which caused slight roll, pitch and yaw of the images, the phone I had in a pocket.

BTW: I found the app linked above while searching for a free (as in beer) possibility to make time lapse with the Sony DSC-RX 100 III. You buy a camera for about 650 EUR – and to make time lapse movies you got to register with Sony and buy an app for 10 EUR? Seriously, Sony? (I knew before buying that camera.)

¹ The app warns about a too short interval and that the real interval will be a bit longer. The images taken had timestamps showing 2 second intervals – maybe I should use a faster SD card.