Telenav gives cameras for free in the US

These cameras are still not ideal.
They cannot serve as dashcams.

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It does not seem to be able to capture stills, but the Telenav version seems to do this.Really nice and small, though.
And a hint to Mapillary, what others are doing to attract the big contributors…

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We’re definitely all ears for suggestions on how we can make image contribution easier, more efficient or higher quality.

Our camera loan program has been going for quite some time now and we’ve been looking at how we can make it more effective.

Ther have been successes, where the recipient contributes large amount of imagery and failures whether the cameras are never seen again and sit gathering dust on a shelf when someone else could benefit from them.

If we can get to a stage that the majority of cameras getting sent out are in regular use, it’s a win-win for everyone.

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has anyone ever experimented with raspberry pi boards? maybe the camera modules arent up to scratch but it would be great if they were since it would be cheap enough and being able to customise the setup would be cheaper overall (like having one board control 4 cameras in your car vs having to buy 4 action cameras). the gps modules you can get for the raspberry pi would be a lot more accurate than the ones found in smartphones as well.

i think a good sneaky way of getting more people to use them might be to design it as dash cam that records video as well as photos. a lot of people dont care about contributing to osm or mapillary but having a cheap dashcam would be something that would be beneficial for them than just taking street view images

having it set up like a dash cam would be a fairly hassle free way of contributing to mapillary too. you wouldnt have to set up a camera each time you drive… just have it recording any time the ignition is on and then if you happen drive any new roads you can get the photos off the device later on and upload them

Totally agree with you on the dashcam front. We have been experimenting with many models for this reason and will eventually have one that we can recommend. The ideal would be direct upload to Mapillary from the device.

A few community projects have used the Raspberry Pi. It has even been used for 4 cam setups if I recall correctly. A bit too fiddly to send out in the camera loan program though.

I hope that my pictures are for eternity.
How is this possible when everybody shoots everything all the time ?

thats great to hear about a possible dash cam option. will it be a manual process like it is now where you stop and start capturing yourself or are there any plans to make it fully automated?

i like the idea of the latter since you wouldnt have to put any thought into it. the device itself could work out which roads need to be captured, at first making sure they are done once or twice in each direction and then after that only capturing if a road hasnt been done in 6 months or a year etc.

some geo-fence options would be good as well so you could force it to not capture anywhere near your home or any other place you want to keep private