Now when you’re viewing an image you will see a count of “captures nearby” in the lower right corner. Click on it to open a carousel with a preview of these images. This should help make it easier to find alternative views of the spot or of nearby locations. When you hover each thumbnail you’ll see a preview of the position from which this nearby image is captured. This functionality is powered by our new radius API.
Thank you very much — this is an excellent addition.
One thing that may create some confusion is that the carousel includes images captured both in the same direction of travel and in the opposite direction. For pedestrian routes, I think this is very useful, as alternative viewpoints are often helpful. However, for road imagery, showing images from the opposite direction can sometimes be distracting and make it harder to quickly find relevant nearby captures.
Perhaps it could be useful to provide an option to prioritize or filter images based on the direction of travel.
Great feature suggestion, thank you @Doriel . You can somewhat see the side of street from the orange cone that is shown on hover (both position and orientation), and agreed that filtering would make it clearer.
While I appreciate the effort, for me the image carousel in its current form is also pretty much useless. Imho it adds more confusion than providing any help, especially for first time users. It just displays random nearby images, which is mostly of no help at all because you have to figure out in your head where any particular image location might be and what direction it faces.
In general, the carousel should only display images of past and future dates (less is more), similar to the list of images on the left in time travel mode.
Hovering over carousel images should highlight their position on the map, just like it happens when you hover over the navigation arrows or the sequence player buttons. Highlighting on the map should consistently follow the same rules. Blue image position highlights of images in the current sequence, green highlights for image positions in other sequences, and so on. Please, do not use alpha blending for image position highlighting.
In its current implementation the carousel unfortunately covers navigation arrows, which imho should not happen. Due to this, it may be a better idea to put it vertically on the left side when the viewport is wider than tall (like mostly on desktop and laptop computers, and potentially also on tablets). If the viewport is taller than wide (like on phones used in portrait orientation) the carousel can be placed at the bottom (like it is now) but the viewport should then decrease its height, so that navigation controls remain visible and accessible.
The date filter should probably also apply to the image carousel. Furthermore, filtering in the carousel should also happen dynamically, that is the images in the carousel should update when the date filter updates.
You may want to set a maximum limit on the number of images in the carousel. For densely captured locations the number of nearby images can grow quickly! Thus, you may also perhaps want to consider to delay computing or requesting the carousel contents until the user actually opens the carousel.
Add a key‑combo to open/close the image carousel.
What Happened to Time‑Travel?
Is it going to come back or is the image carousel going to replace it?
We’ll make some updates in the upcoming release to address some of these (great points):
We will update the hovering indicator to the green marker to indicate that this is changing sequences
We will ensure the navigation arrows are not covered (they will move up above the carousel)
The maximum limit on the number of images in the carousel is 20, I think that should be implemented already.
We’ll add lazy loading to the thumbnails, so they’re not actually loaded unless the user clicks on the carousel
We’ll add the keyboard shortcut “n” (captures nearby) to toggle the carousel
We’re not going to make changes for dates or filters quite yet - I can see benefits to the carousel respecting the filters as well as not respecting them, so we’ll monitor this.
Can you clarify your questions about time travel? It should still be there (attaching screenshot, from example area). Are you seeing it gone in some places?
Thank you for improving the carousel based on feedback. Your improvements sound reasonable. I have spotted a few other things.
The mouse scroll wheel does nothing when the mouse pointer is inside the carousel panel. I think it could scroll thumbnails left and right, similar to the upload feed pane.
If you can, you may want to get rid of or hide the carousel’s horizontal scrollbar. At least, the scrollbar does little for me because it is so thin and difficult to get hold of. Furthermore, scrollbars become transparent in the latest Firefox versions (and potentially also Chrome, though I have not tested Chrome) by default, which amplifies this issue. Touch swiping works already but not an equivalent mouse gesture (which I would prefer in this context over the barely usable scrollbar). So, you may also want to add a mouse gesture to scroll the carousel.
Indeed, the carousel has a 20 thumbnail limit. Excellent!
I was unable to trace network calls enough to say for sure but updates to the carousel should seize when a sequence is playing or the user holds any of the spatial navigation keys. Carousel updates should occur no earlier than like ½ or full second after the player or navigation has stopped.
You may also add a blue tinted background/frame to thumbnails that are part of the current sequence, similar to how it is done in the upload feed. Other thumbnails could have a green tinted background/frame. Though, you may want to check how things look overall in this situation in order to avoid causing information overload to users, especially new users.
Independent of the carousel, I think that overall the web app needs an a11y review and overhaul (although I am not an a11y expert), especially in terms of keyboard use and focus tracing. MapillaryJS and the map view already have a lot of builtin keyboard support but there are some rough edges to smooth out which should enable almost full keyboard web app control.
Time Travel
I asked because I have noticed that time travel is gone in certain locations where it was rightfully before and it has not showed up on my latest uploads like it used to show up (quickly) earlier. Hence, I thought that Time Travel may get phased out with the introduction of the image carousel. Well, I guess the lack of Time Travel may have something to do with the latest global reconstruction recompute? Navigation graph building also seems to be happening more slowly than before. I am absolutely fine with any computational delays as long as they are necessary to make things work correctly. Better be slow and correct than quick and sorry.
carousel going to replace it?
Your improvements sound reasonable. I have spotted a few other things.
Well, I guess the lack of Time Travel may have something to do with the latest global reconstruction recompute? Navigation graph building also seems to be happening more slowly than before. I am absolutely fine with any computational delays as long as they are necessary to make things work correctly. Better be slow and correct than quick and sorry. 