Change ISO value

Mobile apps Android
1

Dear Service Team,

I use the Mapillary Google app and a Pixel 8 Pro smartphone to take street photos for Mapillary. The smartphone is mounted on the handlebars of my bike and is therefore understandably exposed to strong (vertical) vibrations while taking photos. Lateral handlebar movements also affect the sharpness of the photo. While sunlight and therefore image exposure are sufficient to take sharp photos in the summer months, this is very difficult in spring, autumn and winter. There is only little light available for good photos. It is well known that image sharpness depends on the aperture, shutter speed and ISO. I cannot change the aperture of my smartphone camera. I can only influence image sharpness with exposure time and ISO value. I have now noticed that I mostly take blurry photos in poor lighting conditions. A check of the exposure values ​​showed that the Mapillary app primarily sets the exposure time to a very long time and sets the ISO values ​​very low, even in poor lighting conditions. However, in my photography scenario, it would be better to increase the ISO and thus achieve a short exposure time. This would prevent blurry images. Therefore, I would like to have a switch in the Mapillary app to adjust the ISO. It would also be helpful if the exposure and ISO were displayed in some corner of the display.

The settings from my Google Camera app (something in Pro mode) don’t seem to be adopted by the Mapillary app. The Google Pixel 8 Pro is known to handle photos very well in low light conditions.

If corresponding settings are already available and I have overlooked them, please let me know where I can find these settings on the device.

Best regards

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2

Hi @Waldemar - thank you for this suggestion!

The one setting you could try changing is “Use infinity focus” - generally that setting should only apply to driving, but if you are going fast enough on your bike it may also be used. Try changing that and see if anything improves.

We do not manually set ISO in the Mapillary camera app, but use automatic settings suggested by the operating system based on lighting conditions. You are correct that the Google Camera app has more settings and configurations that do not influence the Mapillary app (every app is a separate thing).

In the short term you have a couple (albeit not amazing) options:

  1. For bicycle capture it would be best to use an action camera like GoPro as opposed to a phone. The action camera is specifically designed for withstanding vibration, low lighting conditions, longer operation, etc

  2. You can use another camera app like Google Camera app or Open Camera and then upload the imagery you have captured using the Mapillary Deskop Uploader or mapillary_tools (requires transfering the images or video to your PC)

Thank you again for the feature suggestion on ISO controls, that’s something we can consider for the longer term.

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