So many ways my first upload is all wrong

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This seemed like such a cool idea, and looked so easy. What did I do wrong, how do I fix this, and how do I avoid it happening next time?

My setup: my iPhone, in my pocket. My GoPro, mounted to my bike handlebars. Everything linked up, preview image looked fine, hit start, started to ride. I figured I’d make the first one an easy sequence - straight north up a bike path, it’s a couple kilometres long, then straight back south to where I started.

So what is wrong?

  1. The location is all in one place - the starting point. Well, mostly. I fixed a couple of the images as I did a review before upload, but the phone interface to do this is clunky, so I hoped the system would be smart enough to fix this (it wasn’t) or there would be some web editing facility (there is, so I guess it’s correctable, but still…) My phone was in my pocket as I rode, it was a pretty clear day, wide open bike path in suburbia, so, not a lot of interference to GPS signal. Why is it all lumped together like that? And, is there a way to bulk fix it, hopefully in a “place the first picture, place the last picture, make the tool line up everything in between”? I found the “normalize sequence” button, but, that did not seem to normalize it in the way I would have defined the word. :slight_smile: I’m seeing references to a JOSM plug-in. Is there some external tool to do this?
  2. It made two sequences. I’ve read many things in the forum that say “don’t worry about sequences”. Fair. But why did it do that? I rode straight north, turned around, came right back, didn’t touch my phone or the GoPro for the whole ride, but still it made two sequences, and, it thinks they are hours apart too, which is just plain weird, because they totally aren’t.
  3. The most irritating of the problems: The photos run backwards. Hit play on the sequence, and it looks like I rode my bike backwards for 4 kilometres. While I appreciate Mapillary’s belief in my amazing bike riding talents, I am not in fact a circus performer. :wink: :wink: :wink: I have check the phone’s time, the GoPro’s time, I have viewed the run of photos on the GoPro itself. They all look fine. Why is the sequence backwards, and how do I fix it?
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Hi! Sorry to hear about your GoPro problems!

  1. We use time to synchronise the photos with the GPS positions. If they don’t match for any reason, they will be (very) wrong. The only thing you can do is to edit the sequence in the web by manually moving all the photos to the correct place.

  2. A new sequence is started when you stop and start a capture, and also if the distance is above a certain threshold, 300 m.

  3. Now this is very odd! The only thing I can think of is that the time somehow got calculated wrong.

which GoPro camera are you using and which firmware version do you have installed?

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Anders,

Thanks for the info. Looks like I’ve got same dragging & dropping to do.

My GoPro is a Hero 4 Silver, firmware version HD4.01.04.00.00. It looks like they’ve released a v5. Guess I should update? Though all the release notes talk about is the Karma, which I don’t have. But who knows what bug fixes might have been slipped in there. :slight_smile: If it matters, the phone is an iPhone 6S Plus running iOS 10.3.1.

Should I just delete these reverse sequences? Or leave them there as a fun exercise for the devs to look at to find out why time went in reverse? :wink:

Ian

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In the GoPro app you can adjust the time. It then automatically changes to your phones time/internet time/gps time.

My experience with GoPro cameras is that the clock isn’t very accurate

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Ya, it’s the clock alright, only, that’s not the issue (being slightly inaccurate).

First off, I updated the GoPro firmware. Didn’t make a diff.

I’ve run several test sequences, here’s what I see:

I got a proper bike mount for my phone, so I could see it as the sequence captures (before, I had the phone in my pocket). I can see on the screen as I ride that the GPS is green, the map is tracking, and it is dropping little green dots along my path as I ride. That seems fine.

BUT, when I hit stop and let it transfer the photos to the app, the photos always come in “backwards”, as in, in reverse order from the order that they would show if I shot from the app itself. The app itself shows the first photo taken as the first item in the list (top-left corner of the list of images). When transferring from the GoPro, they come in with that photo, the top-left one, being the last photo taken. They are backwards. If I view them on the GoPro, using its sequence player of multi-sequence photos, they run in the right order.

But here is what the time thing comes in. In the app, it shows a big banner over the photo sequence (in the sequence list) that says the date and time the sequence was started. On my GoPro-shot sequences, they show 6 hours earlier from when I shot them. For example, I just shot a test sequence walking through my backward, at 4:30 PM local time. The sequence shows up in the list as being from “Today, 10:30 AM”. 6 hours ago. 6 hours also just happens to be the time difference between where I live and UTC. But, UTC is 6 hours AHEAD from me. At the time I shot the photos, it would have been 22:30 UTC. I looked at the EXIF data on the GoPro pictures, and I don’t see anything in there that indicates what time zone they were shot in. I did try to set the time on my GoPro to UTC before shooting, but the software ever so helpfully syncs the time on the camera to the time on the phone, which itself is being pulled in from the phone company, so, it is “always right” for where I am.

Here’s what I think is happening: The app thinks it needs to do some time math, because of the difference in time between where I am and UTC. It doesn’t need to, but it does anyway, subtracting 6 hours from the time the photo was shot, making it 6 hours too early, because the photo is already flagged with local time, not UTC. I’m not sure how that makes the photos go backwards, but, well, there it is. But it might also be what is screwing up the GPS info. All photos in any sequence I take with the GoPro always all have the starting point, the first photo placement, as the GPS coordinates for ALL photos in the sequence. Since GPS and time are so interconnected, there’s probably also something going on there.

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OK, so it is a problem in the mapillary app. @Anders already answered earlier on your post, so I guess he is looking for a solution already :wink:

I also use a Gopro, but never use the app. Basically because I don’t have space enough in my phone for another app, but also because I never thought it worked the way I want.
I track my GPS koordinates on my phone and then connect them to my photos with another program (geosetter) and use the webupploader.

You could also use pythonscripts, @tryl has a lot of experience with that.
But I never got it working on my computer :frowning:

Anyway, there are a lot of other ways beside the app, to upload your photos