100M Photos – Geotagged, Connected, and Available for All | Hacker News Reader

100M Photos – Geotagged, Connected, and Available for All

blog.mapillary.com

228 pointslx31 comments

I think it's totally misleading to say that the 100M photos are "available for all" and described as an "open repository of photos" when there is no simple way to download the full database of photos.

I understand that they want to charge $99 per month to embed photos since you could argue they need to pay for hosting but there are no instructions on how or if it's possible to download the full database of 100M geotagged photos, except for a "Contact Us" on their pricing page if you want "access to Mapilliary data".

Crowdsourcing photos by getting people to contribute with a headline "street level photos for everyone" and then charging for access seems like a hustle.

If the database is publicly available for computer vision research, please provide a link and make it more explicit!

I've heard that complain as well. Their mobile app isn't even open source. A buddy of mine had this rant when he was debugging an issue:

https://github.com/mapillary/mapillary_issues/issues/2361

To be fair, their mobile app not being open source is probably the least of all the criticisms. That's not really an expected thing.

I don't understand their headlines either.

They just raised $8M Series A on March, 2016 [1], and their business modell is basically about trying to serve you those crowdsourced photos made by volunteeers.

Like $249 / month if you are trying to use those images in your map [2].

There is nothing wrong with that, but I believe it's the opposite of "available for all" and "open repository of photos", as you've quoted as well.

[1] https://www.crunchbase.com/organization/mapillary#/entity [2] https://www.mapillary.com/solutions

The photos are CC licensed. I think they plan to own the algorithms on top extracting value from the photos. But, I totally agree that there should be simple DB download.

The strange part is that while their legal page confirms the CC license [0], the homepage specifically says "All photos are free for personal, NGO, and educational use." which doesn't imply the same freedoms. Sounds like to me that they're not being completetly honest about the license.

[0]: https://www.mapillary.com/legal

This is great news, congratulations to the team at Mapillary!

All of this imagery is available immediately for use in OpenStreetMap editors like iD and JOSM. The OpenStreetMap project values "ground truth" observations as the most valuable source of information, and these photos let volunteer mappers easily verify conditions on the ground: https://www.mapbox.com/blog/id-mapillary-js/

If you haven't mapped with OpenStreetMap yet, give it a try. It just so happens that this week is OSM Geography Awareness Week: http://osmgeoweek.org/ so there might even be a mapping event near you.

However you don't need a special event for an excuse to improve OpenStreetMap - it is a very unique project in that anybody can make meaningful contributions to the project immediately. Whether you realize it or not, you are the foremost expert in the world when it comes to - your part of the world.

I work for Mapbox, maintain OpenStreetMap's in-browser iD editor (I just released v2.0.0 today!), and I've done a fair bit of streetview imagery collection for Mapbox. Ask me anything!

Could you please recommend an Android library for displaying vector maps?

Mapbox GL is pretty great, as I'm sure the Mapbox guy will inform you. The performance and image quality is top-notch.

On a side note, does anyone know if there's a way to self-host osm? Basically have my own google maps?

https://switch2osm.org/serving-tiles/

There's guides to serving osm based tiles (and some other services) here:

https://switch2osm.org/

I guess if that isn't what you are looking for you would have to be more specific.

There's also a growing number of apps that work offline (With maps, search and routing/directions).

Depending on the application, you can get pretty far with the Data Science Toolkit's geo data[1], some boundary data [2], and something like Leaflet JS[3]. It won't support pathfinding out of the box, but you can do (bidirectional) geocoding, map rendering, state/county/city-level labelling/border-drawing, and lots of other cool stuff.

[1] http://www.datasciencetoolkit.org/

[2] https://www.census.gov/geo/maps-data/data/cbf/cbf_counties.h...

[3] http://leafletjs.com/

The best project by far is osm2vectortiles.org. It pretty much allows you to have a global OSM map on a USB stick, or render it live from a 4 GB VPS.

There is one critical issue which needs to be solved though, Mapbox reached out to them and asked them to rebuild everything from scratch [2], which means that it'll be a few more months before it's legally "safe" to use vector tiles produced by this project.

(disc: I'm just a user)

[1] http://osm2vectortiles.org/ [2] https://github.com/osm2vectortiles/osm2vectortiles/issues/38...

I had setup OSM for my app "Intouch Messenger" however the whole ordeal is a big pain. You essentially need SSD to serve the maps.

Here is the step by step instructions if you are still interested : https://switch2osm.org/serving-tiles/manually-building-a-til...

What is the license?

CC BY-SA 4.0

Where do they state this? A link is welcome.

Go to a photo and find the ellipsis menu. It isn't incredibly obvious, I'll admit.

https://www.mapillary.com/legal.html

Also in their API docs: https://a.mapillary.com/#images-and-sequences

As far as I know, that license does not include the image metadata, which really is one of the more interesting parts of an image collection like this.

The image metadata is not covered, which prompted the creation of OpenStreetView [+].

[+] http://wiki.openstreetmap.org/wiki/OpenStreetView

Now you mention it, the OpenStreetView discussion on HN is where I remembered that detail from.

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=12330311

I tend to speculate that OpenStreetView was started by people inside Telenav because they thought it would be cool to work on it. They built a feature to talk to OBD II dongles, which is pretty far afield from image metadata.

We should also probably start calling it the street photo thing that hasn't been renamed yet.

> I tend to speculate that OpenStreetView was started by people inside Telenav because they thought it would be cool to work on it.

A rising tide lifts all boats. I'd just like to see the entire geospatial stack all the way up to street view open sourced. I'd hate for the world to start to rely on Mapillary, their funding run out, and then ArchiveTeam has to go grab all 300TB of data and put it in cold storage until a new interface is built. Yuck. Let's just do it right from the start.

As image metadata is factual surely it's not covered by copyright.

Sounds like iif it's anything that comes from one of their "Solutions" then it's NC, ND, free for private use but can't be used for anything to do with location (eg mapping, direction finding, etc.). Pretty far from "open".

However on the legal page [2] they say it's CC-BY-SA for "Mapillary Photos [by which] we mean the publicly available street level photos."

It goes on "Attribution should include a clearly visible link to mapillary.com or to the Mapillary photo page directly. Suggested text: "Photos from Mapillary, CC-BY-SA, by @username. ".

The they say "Other photos, videos, logos, map tiles or graphic material on the site are not included in this license.". Which puts the final nail in the coffin of having any idea if a particular photo is a) provided by a solution and so not CC-BY-SA but proprietary, b) an "other photo" and so not licensed at all.

Not sure how you get to the photos without using their "Solutions" either. Prima facie it's a pretty confusing position; I've read a few copyright licenses [ie lots] in my time too.

I'd have to assume the position they're aiming for is "do what you like and if you make money or leech our userbase then we'll sue the ass of you".

This is good though:

"If you would like to use a Mapillary photo in a Wikipedia entry, go ahead and donate the photo to Wikimedia Commons. If you like, we can do it for you. Just send us an email and describe where you want to use it, and we will donate." (/legal.html, === (version 2, April 29, 2014)) //

So presumably it just needs someone to list all the photos and say "please add these to Wikimedia Commons" and all those images will be, per their agreement, released to CC-BY-SA without their specified form of attribution (as that license simple requires reasonable attribution AFAIR).

[But now we need the full legal terms to be able to tell if a "Mapillary photo" is one they created, one on their service, or something else; you'll notice it's not capitalised and so is not the same Mapillary Photo as elsewhere.]

Licensing is hard, yo.

[1] https://www.mapillary.com/terms

[2] https://www.mapillary.com/legal.html

I really do not understand the transition slider between images, it is so ugly.

It looks like an attempt to warp between the images, but it's not matching up the features correctly. It works a little better in the "around the world" examples. Some parts just fade or have the wonkywarp effect, but it produces a smooth transition in other parts. http://blog.mapillary.com/update/2016/11/15/around-the-world...

I think those are two different effects being applied, I agree the second one is working nicely.

How big is a full archive of them all?

I asked in the #osm channel on irc and someone pointed at:

http://www.archiveteam.org/index.php?title=Mapillary

(You can download originals now, that page isn't fully accurate/up to date).

Hundreds of terabytes seems to be a reasonable guess in any case.

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