It seems pretty clear that street-level imaging on OSM is pretty lacking, unless you only want to see highways.

I’m looking to start mapping street-level images for my city, but it seems like there are three players (integrated in the OSM editor), and I don’t know which to commit to:

-KartaView

-Mapillary

-mapilio

My gut is to go with the one with the largest user base (Mapillary), but they are owned by Facebook and who knows what direction they will take in the future or what our images will actually be used for in the long-run.

Karta seems dead.

And Mapilio seems like a knock-off of Mapillary, but with a much smaller user base and an uncertain future.

Are any worth investing hundreds of hours of time to?

    • @[email protected]OPEnglish
      2•1 year ago

      Looks interesting, but it’s not baked into OSM, so the usefulness for mappers would be severely limited.

      • Thibaultmol
        3•1 year ago

        *yet
        it’s being developed by OSM FR. So it’s DEF going to get implemented into osm tools down the lines. Geovisio is pretty barebones atm.
        But the idea is similar to lemmy and mastodon and other federated services. Instead of having one giant server like mapillary, each community can have it’s own server and in the future they could federate together.

        • @[email protected]OPEnglish
          3•1 year ago

          it’s being developed by OSM FR

          We’ll, that certainly changes things! Looks like I’ll be keeping an eye on the project after all 😀

      • @[email protected]English
        2•1 year ago

        None of them is “baked into” OSM, they are available in the iD editor, which is currently the default editor on the openstreetmap.org website.

        • You can access the OpenStreetMap database in a lot other ways not just via the main website
        • You can edit the OpenStreetMap database with a lot of other programs, not just the default iD, via the main website. Me personally rarely edit there (JOSM ftw!), so it was a bit confusing you call it “baked into”.

        Don’t forget, OSM is a geographic database, not a direct competitor to services like Google Maps.

        • @[email protected]OPEnglish
          2•1 year ago

          Yes, what I mean is that the default editor has these street-level services already there for mappers to use, so they have an advantage.

          Mapillary, for example, is also the only street-level option in OSMAND, so even users who aren’t mapping can use the data easily.

          So, if I were to commit to a service to add data to, I would want it to be the one that would get the most user exposure by default.

          “Baked-in” might not have been the best way to describe it, but if it’s available in the default editor, then it narrows down my options.