Tips for a beginner with a phone in a low-quality/outdated map data area?

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I have an iPhone 16 and plan to contribute to Mapillary around this area of Casablanca, Morocco. As you can observe, there are some images already, mostly from Kaart (and I thank them for their excellent work) and other contributors, but they’re either very outdated or low quality (or both), and the city has developed a lot since.

In any case, what I’m more interested in is buildings, house numbers and street names. That’s what I map on OSM (I mapped this entire neighborhood for example). I feel like there’s no actual source for these 3 elements, even though they’re important (no government open data/cadastre, no Google Street View or recent/clear Mapillary imagery).

My idea is to simply walk around, and take pictures (not walking videos, individual pictures manually) of:

  1. Buildings in their entirety (ideally from the other side of the street)
  2. Building entrances/house numbers from close-by
  3. Street plaques

I did a lot of surveys already for building names, house numbers and street names. I’d like to take it a step further, and take actual pictures of these, and afterwards add the Mapillary id of each element on OSM.

What do you think about this initiative? Is this actually useful to upload to Mapillary? Should I take pictures with the Mapillary app or with my regular camera app? Any tips?

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IMO yes all useful to upload.

Keep in mind though that Mapillary is primarily about object recognition and as such needs sequences of images for 3D reconstruction. I’d suggest it is far more useful to take a photo (say) every 3m or so including what objects you want rather than just specific ones. AFAIK the app already works this way.

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Hi @ilias ,

We have a complete guide for capturing with Mapillary iOS app here https://help.mapillary.com/hc/en-us/articles/115001636009-Mapillary-iOS-App-the-complete-guide. Let us know how it goes :slight_smile:

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Now that I think about it, this seems more logical. I was mostly worried about “useless” pictures being automatically taken during the capture, but after reading the guide, I discovered I can individually delete bad images. Thanks.

Very useful, thank you so much!

Will do!

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