I’ve been thinking what would be the ideal way to cary on this mapping. I don’t do this yet, probably I never will, but maybe someone might some day.
To map best takes two people, both with passions for driving, back roads, finding new places, and taking the best possible pictures. It would help if they were computer geeks and had unlimited time and money.
The equipment would be two S6 or 7s with 128 gig SD cards. These would be mounted on the windshield pointing about 20 degrees off straight ahead, one to the driver’s side and one to the passenger side. Ideally you have at least two phone/ cameras for each of these positions. So youll need maybe 5 or 7 phone camers. (You need one free at all times to make and recieve calls.
Then you would want three screens, either tables or phones, tablets would work better.
On one is Mapillary with the “Explore” feature open. On another Google Maps (GM) is open to see what GM mapped and labeled places you are passing. The third screen would have your GM route displayed with mileage to your next turn. Then you’ll want a stand alone GPS as well.
The drivers job is to drive. Go slower than normal, the slower you cover a road the better the stiching.
The navigator/ passenger has a phone/camera in hand on the manual mode, they are taking centered well framed focused pictures of any landmarks and all buildings on the passenger side. If we have a third crew member they would cover the driver’s side.
This way you have the two windshield camera clicking every 3 meters and the hand help taking better “real” pictures of anything you pass.
This rig would leave the motel parking lot 20 before sunrise heading west with the sun behind them and get to the next motel half hour after the sun has set. As late morning comes going west becomes less important. By mid afternoon they want to be heading easterly.
I find a good way to plan a cross country route is to pull up a county seat map. Go from county courthouse to county courthouse. Take the state roads but be willing to explore along the way. Take any roads you find thatt are not on GM or that dont have a road sign. Look for bodies of water. 0Some of the best pictures come from near water. That is where the rich live.
As one phone/camera gets 7,000 images recorded replace it with another and start the first uploading using cell data.
When you get in the very best places to map you’ll find there are no cell towers. Best to have a big box of fully charged phones with you.
I’d like comments on this.
JBTHEMILKER
I have no place for two smartphones on my windscreen. It would obstruct my vision.
I work with OSMAND which shows the streets pictured allready and the track I drive.
But it is not easy to figure out.
““I have no place for two smartphones on my windscreen. It would obstruct my vision””"
I now have one phone mounted in the middle of the windshield. This phone/camera points about 20 degrees off straight ahead towards the passenger side.(right) This is not ideal. This one phone/camera blocks part of my field of view. I also can’t cover the left side of the road.
When I run two cameras the second is mounted by my left ear on the side window. This phone/camera points about 20 degrees forward of looking straight left. This mounts also blocks my side vision.
I guess the ideal rig would have the camera man riding in a dome, up above the vehicle.
I’d like to hear how others mount their cameras.
This is the mount I use, I made two one for each vehicle:
http://mapillary.trydiscourse.com/t/my-frankenstien-windscreen-phone-mount/766
I mount the phone before I move, press start/stop on the Mapillary app when I want and then upload when I come home. It’s easy and for most of the time is done without doing any processing. I may sometimes delete images within the app before uploading if they are no good but other than that I don’t need to do a lot.
"“This is the mount I use, I made two one for each vehicle: Page not found"”
This link does not work.
Doesn’t your phone/camera get full long before you get back home at the end of the day?
Fixed.
http://mapillary.trydiscourse.com/t/my-frankenstien-windscreen-phone-mount/766
Last year I had a 16GB memory card with about 10GB free space for Mapillary and high quality set which made it stop at around 14,000 images just after I crossed the South Australian border into Victoria (around 400km). I didn’t realise it was on the high quality setting and not low quality. I missed out on a good 30,000 images (not more as I don’t take images at night).
I now have a 64GB memory card so I could probably do 50,000 images or more before filling up. I went away last week and took around 16,000 images with plenty of space left plus I could move them to my laptop if I really needed too.
I have the ‘show detailed stats’ enabled from the developer menu which shows memory details when camera is selected.
If you set to have ‘free storage limit’ set to 0% it will have a hard stop limit at 50MB free space and will not continue to take any shots.
Memory isn’t an issue for me at all my biggest bottleneck is upload speed as I’m lucky to get 600kbit out of a ~1Mbit service.