I tie the brake cables a bit together , but not too much of course.
I really wished I had never used my smartphone in my car or on the bicycle.
Now if I navigate from my recent pictures I get into those old and bad pictures.
Hi there, this is just physics. Phone cameras don’t have any shock absorption, be it a high end phone or not. And bike handlebars are shaken at every pothole or minor terrain imperfection.
So on a bike, unless you can have a bike mount with a gimbal, shock absorber or stabilizer, your smartphone pics will basically suck no matter which one you try. I tried with a Google Pixel 3A and most of my pictures were shaken, even distorted. I also tried on another bike with a front suspension fork and results were only marginally better.
Capturing with a smartphone while walking or in a car was mostly OK. Not so much shaking inside a car or with a phone on your hands. Your body acts like a shock absorber.
I don’t like the idea of using a gimbal, so I got a 2nd hand GoPro Hero 7 black and feel quite happy with the results so far. GoPros are specifically designed to capture images and video despite trembling and shaking and they compensate very well for that.
A new GoPro Hero 7 black retails at the GoPro store at about € 250. A low-end gimbal is available at about € 100-150, will require some solution for fixing to a bike mount and will be quite bulkier than the GoPro.
Note other cameras may work just as well or better - I like the GoPro because it’s what I have. It could be better, my GoPro has no compass so I have to manually request sequence normalization, and sometimes GPS is slow to fetch location and I have to discard some images at the beginning of sequences.
My answer would have been : “Yes, if you can bend the laws of physics”.
But Ruben, what you say about action cameras.
Is it not more the amount of light that it can capture that is important ?
Stabilization only works with video.
Ruben, what you say is of course true. But still there are ways to improve pictures. The shorter the exposure time the less blurr. One can play with aperture and ISO to ensure short exposures.
I have taken a couple of series now with Opencamera and while some of the pictures are blurred or out of focus the majority is not. Up to a certain point in the evening when light just gets too low. With the Mapilary app the pictures were of far less quality.
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Based on Bentogen’s suggestion I’ve bought SP Connect bike and car mounts (newer model than the one suggested) and have been taking pictures with it as well as just used it as mount when navigating. It works much better than the Mapillary supplied mount but of course picture taking on the bike is still suffering from rough ground and little absorption by the bike. There are still blurred and rotated pictures in a series albeit fewer than with the previous mount.
Now today I got a newsletter from SP advertising a new “anti vibration module”. I’m somehow doubting a bit that such a small device can significantly reduce the shocks produced when riding along rough terrain but it might be worth a try.
If you have a gimbal you can put the gimbal on a selfie stick in a backpack. Your body will take most of the vibrations and the gimbal will keep the phone (or camera) level.
When shooting 360 degree images I put the camera on a selfie stick like this and uses the internal gyro to orient the image acordingly. This works great.
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Two issues at play here. The upside down images are a software problem, and can be fixed by using software that doesn’t change the orientation of the image based on accelerometer data. The blurred bike+smartphone images are in my experience are a hardware problem having to do with how the tiny auto-focus lenses are built and basically focused by one or more moving lens element(s) suspended by small flexible wires, positioned by magnetic coils … they’re just not designed to maintain focus when there’s lot of vibration. There is no software fix and you’ll find it extremely difficult to eliminate all vibrations by buying a special mount or gimbal. Sometimes you can ever hear this: on my S10e for example, I can wiggle the phone back and forth and hear the focus assembly rattle slightly. The bike and phone jiggle these AF elements brutally and the smallest bumps can cause wild distortions in focus and composition. Your best bet here is to use a fixed-focus lens if your smartphone has more than one camera built in. Action cameras use only fixed-focus lenses, which is why they don’t suffer from this kind of blur. I too use a Samsung S10e and also previous phones in the past.
Less common reasons for blur might be motion blur from a slow exposure speed. You’ll know if that’s the case because everything will be in focus, just uniformly smeared along the direction(s) of motion. Unless you’re shooting at night, typically that’s a software misconfig (ask me how I know! 
) and you can chose an action/sports/high-ISO mode and fix those problems. The apertures of modern smartphone cameras (f/3 and faster, sometimes approaching f/1) are pretty great for daylight; there shouldn’t be any issues with the lenses actually pulling in enough light.
It took me a LOT of bad sequences1, but finally I am able to work around this problem on the S10e and get in-focus photos every time2 by using an alternate camera application which will allow me to shoot through the wide angle fixed-focus camera. My mount is made of solid aluminum so there’s zero shock absorption. You can look in the specs of your phone to determine if it has a fixed-focus lens, and you can confirm that by playing with the phone and observing that you can adjust the focus and/or focus mode of the ‘main’ camera, but not if you switch to a fixed-focus lens. Once you figure out which lens that is, you’re set. A simple option in the Mapillary app to switch lenses would solve these issues trivially but development has not gotten there yet.
I’ll second the recommendations here for Open Camera. It is actively maintained, and well worth a donation to the devs (no relationship, I’m just a fan of the software). Specifically, it’s useful because it’ll let you:
- manually set the orientation so photos aren’t flipped when going over bumps
- specify an ‘Action’ mode where shutter speeds are prioritized in order to minimize motion blur
- set an intervelometer so that images are captured every X seconds
- include gyroscope, compass, and GPS values in the EXIF metadata
- specify which lens you want to use which allows you to shoot through the fixed-focus lens immune to vibration
- specify the save directory which is great if you’re saving to a micro-SD card
! the biggest gotcha is that my metal mount will sometimes do a phantom ‘pinch zoom’ on the screen and zoom in the images – this issue was solved in a rubber phone case which keeps the screen away from the metal.
Bonus: it’s cumbersome, but (on my phone, anyway) you can fool the Mapillary app into uploading any photo for you, so you don’t have to fool around with the web uploader or the computer – you can capture and upload all from the phone.
Sorry for the book, but I hope this info and my years of crummy sequences are a help to someone else.
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Thanks for the book. Gave me a few more ideas on how to improve capturing. One question on Opencamera, though:
How do you specify an action mode?
I wanted to try Open Camera, but I don’t know how to upload photos? I tried moving the photos folder to the mapillary folder. I can see the photos in the mobile app but they don’t upload, is there still a .gpx file missing? I noticed that when using the mapillary app, the .gpx file was always in the folder…but I don’t know how it works when using Open Camera
I move the photos to my Windows computer and then upload them via the Mapillary Desktop Uploader. Before doing so I already sort out low quality images.
Thanks. But apparently that is missing on my phone (from the OpenCamera help page: " Scene mode - Choose a scene mode to apply. (Only available if the camera supports scene modes.)"