Openly licensed streetview with Panoramax
Above: a video showcasing the panoramax viewer, with a map to see where (most[1]) images are, and the 360º views.
tl;dr: If you are interested in contributing to a street-level imagery commons, check out Panoramax
Street-level images are not just a great way to virtually explore places (or for playing the not-so-occasional round of GeoGuessr), but are also extremely useful for providing detailed local information when contributing to OpenStreetMap.
Of course, most of those street-level image collections are produced and controlled by big tech, including Google, Apple and Microsoft. And so, I’d been wondering for a while, if there were any free/open alternatives to those these days. While, back when street-view imagery first started out, a lot of specialised equipment was needed to get GPS-registered, 360º images, today there’s at least somewhat affordable 360º consumer cameras that directly write GPS coordinates too. And beyond that - if photospheres aren’t a hard requirement - each and every smartphone will provide geo-located photos.
With some longer road trips in the current and future - and a wish to convert those into photo data collection trips if possible - I looked into the topic again a few weeks ago and found this great overview of street-level imagery services on the wiki of OpenStreetMap. At first glance it might seem that there’s some options to choose from if one wants to record openly licensed images, but the reality is somewhat sadder: Mapillary and KartaView both make use of CC-BY-SA as their license, but the underlaying stack for hosting and controlling those images are far from open. Not only are their backends all proprietary (including some of the apps for uploading/viewing data*), they are owned by big tech - Facebook & Grab, respectively. Proprietary tools owned & controlled by big tech promise the exact opposite of commoning, so those definitely were out. But, then I saw Panoramax in that list, which pretty much ticks all the boxes for building a sustainable commons.
Supported and developed by the Geocommons Factory of the French National Institute of Geographic and Forest Information (IGN), each part of the whole Panoramax street-level imagery pipeline is openly licensed: From the different modes of uploading data (there’s a web uploader and a CLI tool already), over the backand and the embeddable viewer, to the data itself. And not only that, the system is set-up to allow for federation. Which means that people can spin up their own local instances if they so wish.
The federation of Panoramax helps to address two of the big challenges with providing comprehensive street-level imagery. The first being the pure cost of storage. While storage prices are low, keeping around potentially millions and billions of 360º photospheres from around the world is still a peta- if not exabyte problem. Just keeping those data around in a centralised way is expensive.
The second challenge being potential differences in legal requirements around anonymity/privacy, e.g. in what needs to be blurred/removed. Panoramax provides an API to automatically send each image to a photo blurring service, to e.g. blur out people’s faces or license plates. But depending on the jurisdiction, other things might need to be anonymised too, and local Panoramax instances can also chose blurring methods that suit those needs.
So far, there are two publicly accessible Panoramax instances: One run by the French IGN, which is limited in scope to images taken in France. And one run by the French chapter of OpenStreetMap, which accepts images from a global scope at least for testing (they do not want to become the single repository for the world’s street-level images). Lastly, you can see the federation in action on this joint map that includes that from both.
Which is all a long-winded way of saying: I’ve been contributing images to Panoramax since mid-July and I’m having a blast. Since then, I’ve contributed around 40k images, taken with a 360º camera that takes images every 2 seconds. Mostly by car, but also by foot (and Eugenia by bike). On roads, in the woods and some parks. Between England, France, Belgium, the Netherlands and Germany, for a total distance covered of around 2,500 km.
If you’re now interested in contributing: You do not need a 360º camera that can do photospheres, any smartphone will do to get started. You can check out the instructions on the French OSM instance. And if you want to learn more about Panoramax, Christian Quest of the project gave a talk at last year’s State of the Map Europe.
[1] Mostly, as currently the cut-off for joining images on the map visualisation is too low for the speeds on highways but a fix has already been proposed.
* Update 2024-09-11: Initially, this read that all the viewers & uploaders are all proprietary too, but Christopher Beddow kindly corrected me on Mastodon. I’ve linked to the OSM wiki for the overview which bits are and aren’t proprietary.
