My own version of complete the map

In recent months several cities have done the complete the map. Berlin Germany I think was the first.
Those are fine if you happen to be in the city where the composition is going on.
How about a complete the map where more people can contribute?
I was thinking use routes as the boundaries to the contest.
Here in the United States we have route 6, our longest road, route I 90 our longest interstate highway. Route 50 is known as “America’s main street”
Route one, the Old Post Road on the east coast and 101 on the west coast.
What about route 2 our first coast to coast paved road going from Bellingham Washington to Bar Harbor Maine. The old route 66 is another.
If the contest encompassed a route more contributors would be able to take part.

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This brings back memories from my unicycling days.
Been there, done that.

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I could try to take care of the Historic Route 66.
I rode in 2016 the ACA (Adventure Cycling Association) version of it on bicycle westwards and documented it with Mapillary photos and, independently, GPX tracks - see http://blog.mapillary.com/community/2017/06/16/route-66-on-bicycle-voschix.html
What I don’t know is, how to find and talk to the people that might be interested. Mapilllary seems not have good tools to contact other mapillarists, but I must admit that I don’t know how the “complete the map” events are organised.

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I just do what I do since there isn’t that many contributors here yet. If a few more grey nomads contributed it would make a big difference.

I’m uploading over 30,000 images at the moment after a road trip.

In some weeks a big chunk will be well pictured.

I sort of figured that Route 66 would be the first to be completely covered.
I too have traveled what i could find of the historic route. In my case it was before my discovery of Mapillary.
The complete the map compitions seem to come out of the head office. We can only make suggestions.

@JBTheMilker I like the idea of a CompletetheMap that is more route orientated, even if only a couple are contributing. Let’s brainstorm how this could work functionally. Leaderboard and scoring.

@Didz I keep thinking about the grey nomad idea as well as 4x4ers across Australia. Need to do some research to work out how to contact these people and see which ones would be interested in driving with cameras attached to their vehicle.

Do you have any ideas of a good starting point?

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Word of mouth probably and the ones that know how to use a computer. Good maps are important in the outback so if they know about Open Street Map or osmAnd then I’m sure they will hear about Mapillary.
The biggest limiting factor is uploading. Internet quotas are too small (unlimited does not really exist for mobile/cell or at caravan parks/motels) as well as upload speed.

The place I stayed for 2 nights only gave 1.5GB to use and was only a bit better than what I have at home. I used the final hours to upload a little bit before leaving but the rest of the 35,000 images I uploaded at home which took almost 4 days with no other services running - day and night except for when I was out and capturing more.

This is with the low resolution set in Mapillary and still using version 3.27. Using normal resolution would take weeks and high resolution would take months.

Grey nomads would fill up memory and have little in the way of actually uploading it even if cost is not the factor.

Resolution and quality settings in the app is something that needs to be clarified unless it has been in newer versions I have not tried yet. A JPEG 60 quality 1080 x 720 image is better than no image at all because uploading takes too long that people give up.

For a competition you have to have competitors. The only chance to find several of them is in a big city.
And in this competition some will always have an (un)fair advantage.

For now or enemies are ignorance and inertia.

I met very enthousiast people of whom I saw no pictures afterwards.

I went 4wheeling from Cooper Peedy up to Alice Springs then over to Cairnes in Queensland. This was in the early '70s. The company was based in Cooper Peedy. I don’t remember the name.
I traveled with them for about a month.
I was extremely disappointed that we never left the road. This was a great adventure nevertheless.

I’d think that a cross country route would have to pass by several contributors.
Your right, youll have people like myself who will hop on that Route and go coast to coast, even so, the route gets mapped.

After talking to Peter one of the developers I realize that android phones won’t save to a SD card.
If you could save to a SD card this might be the answer to the downloading problem.
Just take along a case of cards then download them after the trip My S8s with 64 gig internal
memory will hold about 30,000 each, enough for only a single day.
I surly hope in time to be able to save to the Big 256 gig cards all my phones have now.
(It has to be frustrating to be up against data limits all the time.)

JB, you are lagging behind.

https://www.ssdcenter.be/product/785051/category-235425/samsung-portable-ssd-t5-1tb.html

The latest smartphones have an USB C port.

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My S8s have the usb C port. But the way things were explained to me, android will only save data from an app on the Phone’s internal memory.
No use getting a terabyte external storage if you can’t save to it.

This is a bit off topic.
I just took a look at the “T5” 1 terabyte external storage. It would plug in where the power cord goes in.
For Mapillary that won’t work.
With the camera going full out and the screen display illuminated, we need t o keep the phone plugged in. I can’t spare that port.
They will have to come out with something better before I’ll spend the money on that.

Mine does, always had it set this way.

Still using 3.27 on a Samsung Galaxy S5.

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I use two S7s and two S8s. (My s6 has no card but work best of all)
The S7s and S8s won’t save to the card.
I set them to but they won’t.
I asked Peter the developer on Mapillary. He said that was the nature of the beast.

Really good points. If we go ahead, we might be able to leverage their network and have a communal supply of microSD cards that they can drop of on their travels. I’ll see if we can do it on a small scale first here in the ACT.

Today Peter was able to make one of the S8s save to the SD card.
So it can be done.

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Yeah, the Mapillary app can save to external storage, but it isn’t very clear because it doesn’t say “external storage”. For example on my Samsung I need to know that the folder named “7791-7912” is actually the external storage.

For those who can’t figure it out, or using an alternative app that really can’t save to external storage (such as I am, an app called “Time & Tide”), you can always use an Android file manager to move the photos.