Comment by markovbling | Hacker News Reader

Comment by markovbling | Hacker News Reader

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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 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

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.

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