Add a Street View feature

[oleg-rswll]

It is quite useful within Google Maps and Apple Maps to be able to see the actual street (ex. Google Maps Street View), pan around and look at the area.

A similar feature would be very useful in Organic Maps.

Criteria

• Implement a street view feature that is using open crowdsourced data:
  • KartaView
  • Panoramax https://panoramax.fr
  • PLACE https://thisisplace.org
  • OpenTrailView Note: not including Mapillary as it is owned by Meta.
• When in street view, show that the photos are openly available and people can contribute, similar to OSM.

[biodranik]

Integrating with Mapillary is an option.

[Jean-BaptisteC]

A first step can be to add a link in place page to go to the platform

[biodranik]

That's a good idea, is it hard to implement?

[Jean-BaptisteC]

Not just build URL with coordinates Some examples:

• https://api.panoramax.xyz/#focus=map&map={zoom level}/{lat}/{lng}&speed=250
• https://www.mapillary.com/app/?lat={lat}&lng={lng}&z={zoom level}

[oleg-rswll]

Integrating with Mapillary is an option.

Mapillary is owned by Meta, may not be the best option for an open source community project, especially when other options are available.

[biodranik]

Organic Maps is used by many users who don't care about open-source, but worry about solving their issues in a good map app. Guessing, the number of those users may be more than 90%.

[oleg-rswll]

Organic Maps is used by many users who don't care about open-source, but worry about solving their issues in a good map app. Guessing, the number of those users may be more than 90%.

Building a closed source and commercial product is a very different path than what Organic Maps has done so far. If you are suggesting a big pivot for Organic Maps toward closed source, that is a very large discussion.

[biodranik]

I wonder how adding a convenient street view link to the Place Page is related to "pivoting toward closed source".

[oleg-rswll]

If a decisions is made to go with a Meta product when an open service is available, that raises a number of questions.

Selecting a street view service should go through an evaluation process, to understand the offerings and potential trade-offs. Fortunately, today there are open services which rival closed source, and that's great progress compared to just several years ago.

[biodranik]

We can always build our own open-source and privacy-focused street view service! It is just a bit harder than adding a link to existing services...

[oleg-rswll]

When the choices are these, there is definitely a strong preference for one of them:

1) Internally developed solution 2) Closed source, VC backed and owned by META 3) Open-source, not owned by big tech

[eduardmolnar]

Hello, I think a similar but useful idea could be to add an option for users to add their own photos along a POI only for local use (e.g. on a hike you come across something interesting, but it has context only for you) sort of like a photo map. What do you think?

[biodranik]

What will happen with these photos after a hike? Should their copies be stored in OM? What if original photos are deleted by a user from a photo library?

Storing photos on a server can be a possible solution.

[eduardmolnar]

The photos will remain with their POIs as long as the user doesn't delete them. They will be copied in the app storage alongside the POI, so when you export your data the photos are included as well Larger photos could be compressed to a maximum size specified by the user maybe

I don't think we should burden servers with another thing to store, I'm thinking of this feature as an addition to a regular POI, and everything stored on device just like always.

[oleg-rswll]

@SiarheiFedartsou Sounds like an interesting idea. Can you create a new Issue for this to separate it out from the Street View issue.

[Coehill]

You could pull images from Panoramax (see #8546) which uses the panoramax=* tag. It's open-source and federated. Whereas Mapillary is not only closed-source, but is owned by Meta which is actively hostile against user privacy, going against the mission of OrganicMaps.