Mostly by car, I’m recording pictures for Mapillary with an Android smartphone and an external RTK receiver. On the smartphone, I use a first application that is getting RTK corrections from internet and is sending it to the RTK receiver. The RTK receiver is sending back position to the application. Using the " Mock Location" in Android developer options, the application is broadcasting the position to other applications including Mapillary.
But I can see that my pictures are always pointing East:
So, I copied all my pictures on a computer. Looking at exif, I discovered that direction is equal to 90° and elevation to 0 m.
I can understand that, with my setup, it is difficult to get picture direction but why did you removed on the website the option to align pictures to the track direction?
why did you removed on the website the option to align pictures to the track direction?
Because since the retirement of the web uploader and the transition to upload apps imagery is expected to to be feature complete. This similar to how video portals handle video uploads. No online editing. Uploads should be feature complete.
I discovered that direction is equal to 90°
Why is elevation equal to 0?
It is difficult to say why this might happen in your setup. I would assume that Android’s GPS mocker only mocks GPS latitude and longitude but no other GPS data. See what Exif data you get by using your smartphone’s internal GPS receiver only.
Anyhow, already early on during the development of OpenSfM it became clear that elevation metadata is not of much use for reconstruction or map creation. Often enough it caused more trouble than good during reconstruction. So, Mapillary’s street-level use case does not need nor processes elevation data anyway. After all, there are already far better, cheaper, and more effective tools for creating elevation maps, like satellite radars that can reach to below centimeter accuracy for civilian uses.