OpenStreetCam support for the iD editor

Improve OpenStreetMap with street-level imagery

By: Bryan Housel

OpenStreetCam is a free and open platform to contribute street-level photos for improving OpenStreetMap. They’ve recently surpassed 100,000,000 photos with more being added every day.

We use photos like these to map traffic signage like stop signs, turn restrictions, exit numbers, and destination signs . All of this data improves OpenStreetMap as well as our maps and navigation tooling, which means more accurate ETAs, better instructions, and ultimately less time waiting in traffic.

I just released v2.5 of the iD editor, adding support for OpenStreetCam and also making it easier to use street-level photos from both OpenStreetCam and Mapillary.

The new iD editor

With hundreds of millions of photos, some locations have very dense coverage. iD previously tried to display a dot for every image, but now we simply show traces at low zooms. This makes the interface faster, easier to interpret, and it looks beautiful too.

The I-5 and I-90 interstates and the main roads of Seattle have great OpenStreetCam coverage.

Zoom in a bit further and we can see more details about the photos. Each photo is drawn as a circle, and individual traces are highlighted as the user mouses over them.

At medium zoom, we see photo locations and can highlight individual traces

At even higher zoom levels, we can see the directions that the photos were taken. We can also highlight a specific image in yellow and scale it up for better visibility.

Buildings, crosswalks, and street signs are visible in these photos.

The OpenStreetCam photo viewer includes buttons to step forward and backward in the photo sequence, as well as rotation buttons to adjust images that were uploaded in the incorrect orientation. You can see the name of the user who uploaded each photo and the date that the photo was captured.

Get Started

You can help! Smartphones and GPS enabled action cameras make it possible for anybody to contribute street-level photos to OpenStreetCam and view them right in the iD editor.

Follow me on Twitter for updates about the iD editor, or to chat about improving OpenStreetMap with street level photos. Also, check out the iD project on GitHub to make suggestions, contribute code and translations, and learn more about what we’re building next!