OpenHistoricalMap/iD#181 added the whole set of Esri Wayback imagery layers to iD’s background layer picker, one option per “release”, even releases that are redundant to previous releases. This design is functional and I use it a lot, but it was just the result of me hacking away during an Imagery Working Group call, and it shows. There are so many layers that they really get in the way of anyone who is focusing on mapping the past prior to 2010.
I had been planning to hold off on merging OpenHistoricalMap/iD#181 in favor of the more compact design that Meta developed in facebook/Rapid#1351, but we merged my implementation prematurely due to a miscommunication on my part. Rapid’s implementation sports a much more compact UI, though it has the same downside of potentially blocking background imagery loading if the call to Esri’s API fails for some reason. It also requires more clicks to switch back and forth between two Wayback layers, but that’s a minor usability issue compared to the current flood of background imagery options.
The first step would be to revert OpenHistoricalMap/iD#181, then merge the changes from facebook/Rapid#1351. @Bonkles has been very helpful in providing pointers to the code they were working on at the time, but I wasn’t able to find the time to integrate their implementation. It won’t be a completely straightforward merge, because Rapid has diverged from iD in its use of Promises. Long-term, we’ll want to generalize this feature to reuse a similar UI for USGS topoView (#599) and other time series imagery feeds. And, for that matter, #684 tracks adding Rapid as a first-class option for editing OHM.
OpenHistoricalMap/iD#181 added the whole set of Esri Wayback imagery layers to iD’s background layer picker, one option per “release”, even releases that are redundant to previous releases. This design is functional and I use it a lot, but it was just the result of me hacking away during an Imagery Working Group call, and it shows. There are so many layers that they really get in the way of anyone who is focusing on mapping the past prior to 2010.
I had been planning to hold off on merging OpenHistoricalMap/iD#181 in favor of the more compact design that Meta developed in facebook/Rapid#1351, but we merged my implementation prematurely due to a miscommunication on my part. Rapid’s implementation sports a much more compact UI, though it has the same downside of potentially blocking background imagery loading if the call to Esri’s API fails for some reason. It also requires more clicks to switch back and forth between two Wayback layers, but that’s a minor usability issue compared to the current flood of background imagery options.
The first step would be to revert OpenHistoricalMap/iD#181, then merge the changes from facebook/Rapid#1351. @Bonkles has been very helpful in providing pointers to the code they were working on at the time, but I wasn’t able to find the time to integrate their implementation. It won’t be a completely straightforward merge, because Rapid has diverged from iD in its use of
Promises. Long-term, we’ll want to generalize this feature to reuse a similar UI for USGS topoView (#599) and other time series imagery feeds. And, for that matter, #684 tracks adding Rapid as a first-class option for editing OHM.