Upside-down images

Introduction
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I’m new to Mapillary. Ordered my bike mount just after SOTM and I now have about 5 thousand images.

Up to now, I’ve been going through the sequences, manually removing upside-down images, but I’m not sure whether that’s right. Is there any way to flag upside-down images in my sequences so that they can be fixed? Is there a bot that can figure out that the images are upside-down?

And also, why doesn’t the Android client lock the orientation of the camera once the “record” button is pressed?

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The answer is in the forum.

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Welcome @slashme
Unfortunately there is no fix for the moment.
http://mapillary.trydiscourse.com/t/upside-down-images-when-automatically-fixed/2901

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Thank you! I have uploaded a few upside-down images. What should I do with them? And should I in future delete the upside-down images before uploading?

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you could download the originals and flip them. maybe if you report them someone from mapillary can flip them for you.
I’d suggest deleting them, and maybe mounting the phone a bit differently in the future

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The problem isn’t how the phone is mounted: I’m using the bike mount that I got from mapillary. Based on the thread linked above it’s a general problem with the android client: whenever the phone is shaken, which will always happen when a bike hits a bump in the road, no matter how the phone is mounted, it can’t tell which way is up, so every now and then a photo will be taken upside down.

Two things need to be done:

  1. there has to be a fix where the orientation of the pictures doesn’t depend on the phone’s accelerometer. This affects the android client and might be difficult, depending on how the photos are handled by the operating system.

  2. there needs to be an option for users to flag photos for rotation. I’ve looked at the web interface, and I can’t figure out how to do this.

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it’s not exclusive to android, and I think a different mounting angle might actually help.
There used to be (still is?) an option in the app to rotate pictures, nothing on the web

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I solved my upside-down issue by installing an old version of the Mapillary app (3.14 or 3.27) on my new phone

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I really don’t get it. Mapillary is a platform that’s supposed to be enchanted with NN and AI and stuff. Wouldn’t it be super easy to automatically rotate the upside down images?

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They cannot even let us do it manually. They prefer to spend their money otherwise.

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If useful - I had an upside down mounted webcam for a while. Part of the processing was;

mogrify -flip -flop *jpg

This rotates all the image in a directory 180 deg without affecting the EXIF tags.

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So sounds like a problem due to the recognized rotation to me? If you’re right it should be easy to be worked around.

Solution 1: Turn on auto-rotation, rotate the phone to the side, then turn it off again. If you’re lucky it stays landscape, but some phones switch back to portrait even if being held landscape.

Solution 2: On Android 10 (not sure about previous versions), when you rotate the device with auto-rotate off, it shows 2 little arrows in the bottom left of the screen (on the navigation button bar). That temporarily rotates the current app and locks it like that until you exit it or rotate the phone back and hit the button again.

Solution 3: Install the app “Rotation Control” from the Play Store. It forces the chosen rotation on a system wide basis. The rotation can be switched from the notification panel.

Aside from that, have you tried enabling the “pause capturing on shake” option in Mapillary? I guess this is there for just this purpose; pausing the recording if the acceleration sensor exceeds value X, and thus not taking upside-down pictures caused by heavy shaking on bumpy roads.

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issue is that only 1 on 20 pictures randomly is upside down due to sudden bike movements (bad road surface) so its not that a solution to rotate all images at once before uploading.

(as suggested by someone else, the app should keep the orientation from start recording and not flip 180 degrees, ignore vertical movements observed by the phone during that sequence recording)

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It’s not about the recognised rotation: I have auto-rotate off.

Because I’m on a bicycle on roads that aren’t perfectly smooth, “pause capturing on shake” would mean that I get basically no pictures at all. All the app has to do is to assume a fixed orientation. Once the capture starts, the phone isn’t turning upside down every now and then, so the “feature” of detecting the orientation of each photo is worse than useless.

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