Web upload is gone. Worse, being forced to download a windows app w/out proper cert + sig.
Can we undo this move?
Noticed last night that the automatic update of the DU v.1.2.8 didn’t proceed, and that the AV flagged the download from the mapillary website as suspicious.
The result of that is that -at least for now- Mapillary will be bereft of my contribution, which is especially unfortunate for people who use those images to update OpenStreetMap.
You’ll have noticed that I tend to include a fair number of not yet included ways in my cycle rides? There may not be many traffic signs, but they do indicate ‘see, nothing to see here’.
Perhaps most importantly (this is separate from the ISP thwarting malicious activity and ‘state security’ doing their job!!) : I’m not keen on any entity (be they commercial or state-sponsored) deriving information on me and my interests / preferences, building some personal profile and especially frown on that entity or one of their customers deciding what I get to see -or more importantly : what I don’t get to see- based on their inevitably broad-brush inference of what possibly interests ‘me’.
On to the subject of this thread, the discontinued Web-uploader : the DU v.1.2.8 regularly found what were deemed errors in the Exif section of thousands of photos taken with Mapillary’s recommended action camera, the GoPro Hero9 black; on inspection found that location and time of capture were present in the Exif section of rejected files, and that these pics appeared in the correct spot when uploaded with the Web-uploader. 1-0 for the WU, then.
A second drawback of the DU is that it takes several hours to process the photos, without much visible effect - had it applied something along the lines of ImageMagick to optimise the photos one could see a benefit, especially if it greatly reduced file size. Nil points for the DU on this, then.
In processing the photos, the DU keeps track of progress by writing what are shown as zero-length files, 23 in all per photo. Found that for say 28GB of photos those progress files needed an additional 14GB of disk space - perhaps ought to mention that the day’s harvest of pics is viewed on a hexa-core desktop, to weed out clearly blurred pics, and ones not for publication; the pics are then copied to an SDXC card which is inserted in a low-power-consumption notebook for uploading : no need to spend in the order of 100W when 7W will do the same upload, is there? 2-0 for the WU.
Thus two main issues with the retirement of the WU: 1/ DU apparently doesn’t meet fairly relaxed requirements of AV and Windows , 2/ DU takes inordinate amount of time and disk space to get things ready, and after upload again takes a lot of time to remove those keeping-track-of-progress files - although advantage of usinf SDXC-card is that one can just format the card … , and 3/ DU rejects images which were taken while on the move at in the order of 5m/sec, at a one second interval on the incorrect ground that Exif info is missing. .
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My experience for a couple year has been the windows uploader has been plagued with issues like this. I hate to be a drama queen but I don’t trust it at all at this point.
Rolling it out in a way that Windows / Windows store doesn’t recognize it as being safe is, unfortunately, par for the course.
I signed up on this forum to specifically make this complaint. I don’t like installing yet another program, but if I must… then name of the .exe file is a long string of garbled characters without a proper certification of the file. Looks like your download page has been hijacked. I’ll not be contributing via Windows upload till this looks more secure.
@wordplay, is your windows flagging the download as not legit?
No flag. I hover over the Windows download link and see this:
“https://tools.mapillary.com/uploader/mapillary-uploader-2.0.0.exe”
and then click the link and see this:
and that looks mighty unsettling.