Is Mapillary City Centric?

Having come to Mapillary as a result of the catastrophe that befallen Google Earth with the trashing of the Panoramio Layer, I am disappointed that I am not able to find much in the way of imagery outside of towns and cities.

Maybe it is because I do not understand how to drive the maps or is it that Mapillary is designed to be city centric. I see lots of green lines and dots in towns and cities but nothing in the countryside or on quiet coastal areas. If looking in satellite mode and I click on any of the menu options I am taken back to street map view. This leads me to assume that Mapillary people do not travel outside the city walls.

As my interests and activities involve the wild, unpopulated places and not cyling or city life, I am thinking that I am in the wrong place.

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Thank you for your response. My query was not so much about where I live, I already know about that, it is more about where I wish to go, visit, explore.

However, from your expanation I take it that it is designed from a city point of view, with driving/commuting being its raison d’etre and not so much walking and exploring.

For the time being then, Mapillary will not be a sustitute for the Google Earth that was and is now deceased. I will watch with interest to see how it develops and perhaps try to influence development with a few images.

I would not call Mapillary city centric in a specific way. It is correct that Mapillary is deriving some metadata from pictures which the provide to OSM and try to sell. Most of it is city related, e.g. street signs, but they also try to detect nature related items such as trees or grass. If a proper buisness case should arrive, I am sure that they will create more no city metadata.

When that is said, Mapillary does not give any more credit to city images. As a normal user, there is nothing that separates images from a city from images in the nature. Personally I have posted a ton of nature sequences.

What Mapillary does different than Panoramio is, that Mapillary is focused on sequences. You can upload sequences with 1 image in each, but it works best with a series of images. So if you take series of pictures Mapillary will just be the place for you. If you are looking to showcase you very best photos, they are welcome but they will lack some functionality and you should link to the from your website rather than hope people will see them through Mapillary.

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Panoramio was an amazing, social and environmental archive of images which has been lost to the world in a way that is akin to the destruction of ancient sites by terrorists in the Middle East.

We refugees from Google Earth, as well as posting images, used the Panoramio layer to plan expeditions to more remote areas of the world, environmental and archeological research to name but three uses amongst many. We are therefore seeking something where this important archive can be re-built and viewed in context with satellite imagery.

i plan on adding a lot of hiking trails to mapillary but ive only done roads/streets so far. its much easier to put my phone on the dash and take photos while im going from A to B and i would imagine its much the same for a lot of people.
having to record trails is a different story since cant do it every day and only works if you are on your own (unless you are ok with asking everyone that youre with to walk behind you the whole way), so i think it just happens less often.

but yea its a real shame that there still isnt any proper panoramio replacements around. mapillary is too focused on sequences and even if you did add single POI photos there is no way for others to find them other than manually clicking around on the map.
even something as simple as having a different coloured lines for nature/hiking trails would make it a lot more useful

It should not be hard to add Mapillary on top of sattelite images. But someone will have to do it and the community will have to add their pictures to Mapillary. One could also add specialized functionality on top of that.

Adding them to Mapillary will at least not harm anything, so I will only encurage to do it.

But what will Mapillary need to be more friendly to this usecase?
Does it hurt that sequences are shown or it is only nessesary to show individual images more clearly?
Would it be usefull to be able to tag images in a certain way?
Anything else?

I can understand that. Sequential imaging is a completely difference thing to the simpler and easier to digest, Panoramio single image.

I live in hope to see the Panoramio archive and style again. To hell with Google.

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Then you have not looked in Belgium. Openstreetcam is road centric.

Indeed it is but unfortunately, road/commute/city sequential imaging, while being very clever and no doubt useful and fascinating to you, it doesn’t provide the information that the single image Panoramio style, used to provide for my purposes.

I have definitely contributed more footage of streets than the countryside, but I do like to survey footpaths, especially where they’re mapped with little detail on OSM. It’s also highly unlikely to ever be touched by Google street view as there’s no commercial incentive most of the time.

Panoramio felt great for touring, rather than surveying. A subtle difference that I’m not even I could describe the difference between.

thank you everyone for your help, i really appreciate it all a lot. i would like to know if i may ask you some questions as well? as i’m new here. thanks so far anyway!

I think the difference boils down to single image (Panoramio) shows topographical views from a location, whereas Mapillary sequential imaging is showing somewhat narrower/closer moving imaging from the viewpoint of transport.

Single images are more useful from the point for scouting locations for expedition and field research planning etc.

So the difference may not be the actual site but what people is encuraged to put up. So if Mapillary had a filter that only shows single images (and highligtes them better), it may get a more panoramio feel?

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I think that sounds like the germ of a plan. If implemented, it would go along way towards making Mapillary a substitute for the much loved and important Panoramio layer while still do what Mapillary currently does.

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Let’s ask the opinion of JB Milker on this delicate matter.
Yet I am more interested in the gender of angels.

Mapillary is not city-centric. I’ve uploaded tons of images from small footpaths, forest roads and even bodies of overgrown water - Mapillary . They haven’t sent any hate mail to me yet. Jan Erik even congratulated me on some forest path sequence years ago - even if he was just being polite, that’s surely a sign it’s far from city-centric.

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I started using mapillary since May 2018 and never once felt it was city-centric. I live in a village in remote parts of middle England and whole areas around me have not being mapped compared to nearby cities, and instead of feeling Mapillary is city-centric, I took it as a personal challenge for me to add imagery of roads, footpaths to Mapillary in areas which are away from cities.

Just my 2 cents

Mapillary is people-centric, not city-centric. The images are where people who participate, go. Just by the numbers, there will be more people in larger cities who participate, thus resulting in more images in cities than rural areas. Speaking for myself, I enjoy getting out of the city and exploring, and so I have quite a few sequences in places that Google Street View, HERE, and other such operations will never go, but that one day someone might find interesting. Do you like to go camping, but want to see what an organized campground looks like and what facilities are present?

Or maybe you prefer something more primitive, but need to know what the road to get there looks like before you go?

And that addresses your other point. Mapillary is more equivalent to Google Street View / HERE street view, than it is to Panoramio (and its inclusion in Google Earth before they shut it down).

But the best part is: if you don’t see imagery in a place you’d like to go, then go ahead and get the imagery yourself. You’ll never see Google/HERE/others let you do that.

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"
Mapillary is people-centric, not city-centric.
" ~ @JackTheRipper

That’s an excellent way to put it. It embodies everything.

@JayOh, if you approach it with this lens, that it’s people-centric, I think it will make a lot more sense. It allows for most whatever people want to do with it. While the GUI that Mapillary provides doesn’t have the focus that Panamoiro [sic] had provided, it provides an API that would allow folks to create their own GUI that would do just that.

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From what I have read and understand about Mapillary is that there goal is to 3d map the earth. So, I get they want every image, every lake, every forest, and every trail.

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