My GoPro7 Setup and Workflow

Contributing and equipment Action cameras
12

Hi dear all,

I really like the stabilizer, the GPS precision and the auto light adjustment function on my GoPro 7 Black. The fact that it’s sturdy, reasonably affordable, has plenty of gear available (mounts, etc), has a somewhat decent battery life and an acceptable shooting angle are all pluses.

The thing I don’t like about the GoPro 7 Black is that it does NOT have a compass, so it does NOT register EXIF orientation or direction of a sequence.

Fortunately there are command line tools for that, available here: GitHub - mapillary/mapillary_tools: Command line tools for processing and uploading Mapillary imagery

My workflow is as follows:

  1. I format the SD card prior to every capturing session

  2. I go out and capture :smiley:

  3. Back home, I copy every picture to the same folder “path/to/images” (you name it). The GoPro stores a max of 1,000 images per folder (100GOPRO, 101GOPRO…) so I do this manually. There is an option to upload subfolders with the command line tools, but I have never tried that.

  4. I use Windows 10, so I launch the command line tool with Win + R, then writing “cmd” at the text box.

  5. I navigate DOS style to a dedicated folder on my desktop where I have the mapillary_tools.exe file and where I have pasted the images, and I run:

mapillary_tools process_and_upload --user_name YOUR_USERNAME --advanced --import_path “path/to/images” --rerun --organization_username YOUR_ORG_USERNAME --organization_key YOUR_ORG_KEY --advanced --interpolate_directions --keep_original --verbose --duplicate_distance 0.5

This command processes all the JPGs at the given folder path, obtains a direction by interpolating with the next image, eliminates images that are closer than 0.5 m away from one another and uploads all that to Mapillary under the provided username and organization.

You will have to authenticate with your username and password on 1st run, then you won’t get further auth requests.

If you don’t want to upload to an org then simply delete those references on the command.

Note that the path is written between inverted commas “” while the rest of the parameters that should be changed are NOT. I wrote those in CAPS. I suggest you use the inverted commas especially if your computer file system is not in English, because you could have some non-ASCII chars that could throw an error.

This saves me a lot of later work requesting someone to normalize the trajectories at every sequence. I also find it slightly faster than using the web app. I never ever got the Desktop Uploader to work.

I hope you like these tips, thanks and regards!

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