Can and does someone replicate the Mapillary images database?

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Hi,

I discovered Mapillary recently, and I’m rather impressed by how mature the solution is and how complete the image database is. I’m also very happy to see an open solution.

I’m wondering about the long-term survivability though: imagine a disaster scenario where, for example Mapillary is bought by a company who decides to stop providing the images/service. Would that mean that the whole set of images is lost?

Since images are CC-licences, someone else could use the images and build a similar service with the existing images, but this is assuming that someone has this set of images, i.e. that someone replicated it before the service is closed.

Hence my questions: can someone legally replicate the Mapillary image database? My understanding is that downloading individual images is OK but the 50,000 images limit for the “free” plan prevents one from replicating the images without paying. One would need at least a paid plan to do so. Is this understanding correct?

The obvious next question is: if it’s possible, does someone already do so?

Thanks in advance,

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The terms of service prevents you from downloading a large of images in an automated way. Further, only Mapillary and the person who uploaded an image has access to the full resolution version without a Mapillary water mark.

It is a very real risk that Mapillary may get bought at any time and all access to the images is removed.

Personally I am trying to keep a local copy of all of my images, but that is about 4 TB for just my almost 1 mio images.If we scale Mapillarys 177 mio images up to that, we get about 560 TB of data - just for the original and then the smaller versions comes. Just storing the images in a RAID with no backup would be very expensive. I don’t want to think about Mapillarys expenses to keep all those images!

You can also see http://mapillary.trydiscourse.com/t/how-open-is-mapillary/673

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Yesterday, I was once again afraid that Jan Eric had not paid his bills to AWS. But luckily it was another 12 hours computer problem.

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