Which areas to map? How to get it?

Hi

While I am based at Graz, Austria, I travel a bit around. Mostly in each place I land, I start mapillary and do some sequences.
But what are the folks interested in? Streets between the cities, the city itself, small footways, path?
Zoo (Salzburg), botanical garden (Montreal)? A Fun Park (Uetze)?
Also how can I reach people to map a area I am interested in?

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Hi @Amiga4000,

Thanks for asking this question. It is very valid question and we are right now working on the product to be better in connecting members in the community. Could be that one member ask the community to map the botanical garden in Montreal and another one really wants to see the Zoo. We also want to create a platform for people to being able to talk about a specific area but unfortunately it is still work in progress.

So my answer to your questions would be that map the places you think is worth putting on a map. We want them all :slight_smile: As for reaching out to people in a specific area, I know it is not optimal but one solution to find other mappers could maybe be to use the map and search for areas and then make a comment on a photo asking the user to connect to the forum where you can have a discussion? If you have other ideas, please share them as well.

Cheers,

Sandra

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@Amiga4000 Could also be worth checking to see if there are any Maptime Chapters in the areas you are interested in.
As a community of people interested in GIS, often familiar with Mapillary, they may be interested in improving the coverage of a given area.

Yes.

But if you want a longer answer: I started off wondering if I was imaging areas people were interested in. I finally realized that I was spending too much time worrying and not enough time taking pictures. So, I just started shooting everything. And trust me, a lot of it is really boring. (Rural Georgia highways? BOR-ing. Rural Florida highways? MORE boring.)

So just take pics of it all. Someone will find it interesting.

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Hey

Yeah, a lot is boring. Thats why I map nearly everything, mostly in my living area while doing bike trips. It is more or less a challenge in “can I do all roads in my city?”. I´ll do some interesting part, too. E.g. Eggenberg in Graz, a fun park in germany, the MeraLuna Festival in Hildesheim, some touristic sites here in Graz,…

Currently I am interested in some pictures from russia/caucasus area, as I cannot travel there yet.

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I was wondering about that. It’s nice to be able to see “connections” and know that I’ve mapped somplace that someone else has mapped. But being able to have something to find and connect in other ways would be nice, too.

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I’m really enjoying the sequences artguard is uploading from the Caucasus @Amiga4000

My opinion - more priority to roads and footways, witch not covered by Google Maps:

  • unofficial paths in city
  • suburban forests - the quality of surface of forest tracks will be intresting for cyclists
  • gates in diffirent fences - a photo and acccess tags in OSM much better, than only access tags. We have many fenced allotments area in Moscow oblast, and opportunity of access constantly changed.
  • construction sites - good for time travel.
  • industrial railways (only if it is not forbidden to walk, depends on local laws).
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I want to be able to explore the mapillary map while driving so I can plan my mapping route based on which streets are not mapped yet

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I like to see where my home area/neighbourhood isn’t on mapillary yet so I map here. Eg I can see that a part of the forest nearby is mapped by someone here- bike I think , so I avoid that area. I like historical buildings, which might disappear, and nature walks and suburban houses , lanes and streets. It all changes in time.

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I like that idea. Ideally I’d be able to create a route via Google Maps and it’s directions feature. It already lets me drag and moving my routing, add points, etc. If I could impose a layer showing a Mapillary photos map w/ filtering, and save the route, it’d be nice. I could throw the phone on the bike and hit streets that I haven’t been up or down in the last month or drive a route to Nashville that involves zigzagging on some secondary roads that haven’t been covered yet.

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@allen, there’s already talk about adding a Mapillary layer to OsmAnd, and maybe a routing engine that can take existing Mapillary sequences into account when creating a route:

Mapillary layer in OsmAnd (scroll down to @Sandra’s comment).

Project OSRM http://project-osrm.org/ uses OSM maps and has a similar drag-route capability to Google Maps, although ever since they dropped Imperial conversion from their routing demo system, I’ve found it a lot harder to use and fall back to Google Maps more often than I like (which is to say, most of the time now). Which sucks, because I’d rather use an OSM-based router to work on OSM-based stuff, and OSRM also has a nifty GPX export function that is lacking in Google Maps (yes, I know about other websites that will take a Google Maps route URL and convert it to a GPX file).

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This is what I do: I have a look on my mapradar http://r.geo.hu-berlin.de/~moenkemt/mapillary/mapradar.html and try to take roads that are not covered yet.

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Wow. Thank you @jackTheRipper and @moenk. I put those on my list to dig into more and understand what I can do with them.

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We are indeed working on our own routing tool, hope to get it to you soon so that you can easily explore the unexplored. :smile:

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I’ve finally been able to use the new map-in-camera feature on my Android devices – and I’m LOVING it! It still needs some tweaking to be perfect such as zoom controls and routing to unmapped roads in general would be a great plus and to previously specified unmapped roads even better. But it’s really great already for being able to find the unmapillaried roads much more easily. On top of this it can also make the capturing viewfinder small which is a definitive plus for increased traffic safety while driving…

I’ve tried it a few times, and have had problems where it seems to cause Mapillary to lock up or otherwise stop taking sequences. I haven’t had the time to do any detailed troubleshooting and testing yet, though. If you think you have that happen to you, too, let me know so we can coordinate testing it and write up one comprehensive bug report.

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I’ve experienced the app to freeze a few times too (now that you mention your problem). I’ve thought that it has been related to the phone over heating (which it has). So, I’m guessing that my problem is different than yours. But who knows.

FWIF: The times I’ve had the problem I’ve moved the phone for a few minutes into my “traditional” (vertical) phone holder that I’ve attached to the car air vent in the middle of the dashboard. With AC on the phone will cool pretty well in just 2-4 minutes.

I don’t think it’s an overheating problem–at least, not the problem I’ve experienced. At least some of the time, I’ve had my windshield defroster running with cold air, and the phone felt fine. The app usually will eventually recover, but it takes time.

Have you noticed it with other apps? My aging iTouch, 5th gen, occasionally freezes. A better way of saying is that it’s a long pause, sometimes 2 or 3 minutes. I have a couple games I play on it here and there so I notice it. In playing around, I realize it happens when those apps aren’t running. It’s some other combo of apps and/or iOS.

Soooooooo… maybe this is something other than the Mappillary app? It’s just that it’s the one thing you have open on your phone for long periods of time so you notice the pause. Afterall if it’s doing that while you’re at work and it’s sitting on your desk, you won’t notice that it got stuck for a minute or three.

Or it’s the app.