The latest addition to the Mapillary toolset is a desktop application that lets you upload thousands of geotagged images with little time and effort.

Mapillary helps fix the world’s maps by letting anyone create fresh map data with cameras. All you need is a simple device (like a smartphone or action camera) to capture street-level imagery anywhere and as often as you need to help keep maps up to date.

While the Mapillary mobile app has built-in upload functionality, you need to use separate tools for upload if you’ve captured geotagged images with some other camera. An obvious choice for many contributors—individuals and organizations alike—is our web uploader. It works well in general but can become problematic if you have thousands and thousands of images to upload (as it’s constrained in your browser, it can’t make use of your file system to boost performance or save progress).

To solve this, we’re now releasing the Mapillary Desktop Uploader, which is a desktop application that lets you conveniently upload large amounts of geotagged imagery to Mapillary. That includes organization imagery (both private and public), in case you are contributing on behalf of an organization.

The Desktop Uploader can handle much larger image quantities than the web uploader, is able to prevent your computer from going to sleep in the middle of the upload process (e.g. if you want to leave 25,000 images uploading overnight), and can pick up where things were left off in case something interrupts the upload—whether it’s a connection issue or you just need to pause it for some reason.

Getting started

To get started, download and install the application for macOS or Windows.

Download the Desktop Uploader →

Once installed, sign in to your Mapillary account, select the upload target (your individual account or the organization you want to contribute to), and add a folder with the imagery you want to upload. After confirming, the images will be processed and uploaded to Mapillary.

The Desktop Uploader is a great choice over the Web Uploader if you have a lot of imagery because its performance is not limited by browser capabilities, and it doesn't require handling the command line like our Python tools. GIS expert and Mapillary Ambassador Søren Johannessen tried it out and was delighted:

"The wait is over! From time to time, as I've taught my coworkers about Mapillary, I have found that uploading from an action or 360° camera was a little bit of an Achilles' heel. The process was not so user friendly when contributors are not very techical-minded. Now the standalone Desktop Uploader solved this problem with an easy and simple interface. I'm looking forward to showing and teaching my coworkers this new tool in 2019."

What’s next?

The first version of the Desktop Uploader focuses on a simple workflow for uploading large amounts of images. There is a visual representation of the imagery that you’re about to add, but no review opportunities (such as adjusting the positions or removing a subset of images). This is something we intend to add in future releases.

Another line of enhancements is support for processing more file types, such as video files or 360° images that need stitching. Currently, if you want to use these advanced options, we suggest you turn to our command line tools.

We hope you’ll give the new uploader a try and share your feedback. Let us know how many images you managed to upload with it, and which features you would like to see added next.

/Matias Volpe, Front-End Developer