We at Mapillary are great fans of OpenStreetMap and are very happy to see that Mapillary is a useful tool for map editing. With Mapillary you can capture street photos when you walk, ride your bike or drive. Once you upload the photos to Mapillary they are available for map editing on OpenStreetMap. The photos are useful for capturing features you can’t see on satellite imagery like building information, road conditions, traffic signs etc. By nature, it's often the most up-to-date source of reliable information on the ground.

Up until now, according to Taginfo, thousands of individual features have been tagged with Mapillary, indicating that the photos are indeed being used as a source of map edits. Since Mapillary is also great to visually describe an object, sometimes the goal is not to edit the map in the strictest sense but to enrich the information it contains by linking an image to an existing object. Sometimes even indicating from which direction the photo is taken from.

Now, that is a lot of details and there’s more to that since it can be more convenient to just add source to changesets than to individual features. Quickly querying changeset comments and source tags to Mapillary reveals more than 32,500 changesets from Antarctica, through New York City to the North Korean border, submitted by almost 500 individual mappers.

Changeset comments and source tags to Mapillary on OpenStreetMap

Here is a guide on how you photo map with Mapillary.

Step 1: Capture photos

To get started you need the Mapillary app on your iPhone or Android. Create an account, go to the camera screen, select walking or riding mode, tap the green “Start” button and start moving. Keep the camera straight in horizontal orientation (either in your hand or use a mount) and the app will automatically capture photos for you. The app will store location information and save photos in sequences.

When done taking photos or if you want to do a new sequence press the red “Stop” button. To make the exploring experience nice, try to capture at least 10 photos in one sequence. All photos and location information will be stored on your phone until you choose to upload them to Mapillary.

If you want to capture photos with an action camera here’s the guide for you.

Step 2: Upload photos

When you've photo mapped your area it's time to upload your photos. By default the app only allows uploads when you are on wifi. To upload navigate to the upload screen, review your photos and if needed, delete the ones with bad quality. Once you upload your photos they will be deleted from your phone, made public and connected to others with the same location data. Faces and licence plates will be blurred.

Step 3: Explore places

You can find your photos on your profile page or by exploring the map. To find the photos on the map go to the area where you have been capturing and press on the green trail. You can also see photos that other community members have captured.

Step 4: Edit in OpenStreetMap

Your photos are now ready to be used for editing OpenStreetMap. You can use either the iD editor or the JOSM editor. Head over to our Help Center for more detailed instructions for both tools.

Mapillary appreciates attribution for derived metadata, for example using the tag "source=Mapillary" or by linking to mapillary.com. Alternatively, you can use the existing mapillary key [http://wiki.openstreetmap.org/wiki/Key:mapillary] to indicate which photo describes your OpenStreetMap feature, or put Mapillary in your changeset description or source.

Stories from OpenStreetMap

Here are some nice Mapillary stories from the OpenStreetMap community:

OSM <3 Mapillary by Blackbird27

Mapillarising Brazil by Harry Wood

OpenStreetMap and Mapazonia in Peru

We hope this will get you started with photo mapping on OpenStreetMap with Mapillary.

/The Mapillary team