Mapillary doesn't record compass direction, OpenCamera does

Mobile apps Android
1

Hello everyone,

I’ve been using Mapillary lately and switched to compass for picture orientation instead of moving direction, and the result is bad : no direction is recorded, meaning that I have to correct it myself for every picture, which is long and frustrating.

I checked by downloading the unprocessed image and the direction is indeed absent from the EXIF of the image. So I tried just taking a photo with the Open Camera app, and surprise : there is a direction stored in the EXIF, and it looked pretty good. So should I dump the Mapillary app altogether or is there an easy fix for that ?

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If I remember correctly, Mapillary does record the heading/bearing but it is stored in a different field than the standard EXIF one.

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I have the same problem. The images all point to the same direction after uploading them to mapillary, so the direction is not stored correctly in any field that mapillary reads. I had raised an issue already on the old the bugs tracker, but nothing has changed. That’s why I stopped using the mapillary app and switched to Opencamera when I want to record compass direction.

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4

Maybe, I haven’t checked all exif tags. But the result is pretty clear : all my pictures point North, even though the compass works great (verification made with OpenCamera & the compass display changes direction in the Capture screen when turning the phone).

5

In that case, disregard my previous statement. I had previously been unable to find the EXIF field but my pictures did orient appropriately when uploaded to Mapillary. If your images are all pointing north then this is a different issue.

6

I have problems with the Mapillary App picture bearing. Maybe because I have to use legacy mode to get usable images.
Anyway, there are two ways to fix the bearing:

  • After the upload select the image sequence, edit it and click on ‘Normalize Sequence’. Then if your pictures were pointing right use ‘Set Offset’ with a 90 degrees value. Adjust similarly for other directions.
  • Or use mapillary_tools to fix the direction of the images before they get uploaded.
7

I’m using legacy mode as well, and I get all pictures pointing north when shot in compass mode.

Both methods you mention only work if you shoot in the direction of travel (or with a fixed offset to the direction of travel). If you shoot at random directions, you have to fix every single image, and that’s only possible when you can infer the direction from the surrounding elements.

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Same here, with 3.158. And when I enable the “compass” setting, it is automatically reset after restarting of the app, which is extremely annoying.

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@mapillary, do you know about this problem? Are you aware that this results in millions of wrongly tagged photos, until it is fixed?

Maybe it is related to the problem that standard Google Camera does not record compass direction in the EXIF tag, whereas Samsung Cameras do record the direction? The solution would be for the app to just record its own direction.

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As there has been no official reply here, I reported it to support@mapillary.com.

Update: The mapillary app does record the compass, however it does not show on the map in mapillary (always north). It shows in josm. But it is very imprecise.

One further observation: Distance-based capturing with 10° angle does not seem to work. That means, I have to revert to 0.5s to not loose turn/panorama function, and therefore creating lots of unnecessary pictures during straight walks.

However the compass is shown in the app and seems to react to me turning the phone…