Hello OSM Community,

I’m currently working on a project to capture 360° images of the city of Salzburg for Mapillary, and possibly for Panoramax later. My goal is to enhance OSM data in Salzburg, especially in areas with notes that could be resolved with better visual context—something 360° images can provide.

Getting the Camera

I reached out to the OSM Belgium team to ask if I could borrow one of their 360° cameras. To my surprise, they informed me that there was already a GoPro MAX 360 in Austria! After checking with the local OSM chat, it turned out that mcliquid had the camera and kindly offered to send it to me.

Route Planning Challenges

Before starting the project, I wanted to plan an efficient route to cover as many streets as possible without overlapping - essentially the Chinese Postman Problem. Unfortunately, I couldn’t find a tool for this problem.

Initially, I tried bikerouter.de to created a GPX route. After importing it into OSMAnd, I found that it wasn’t working as expected - it tried to auto-route between the points instead of following the plan I made. This wasn’t practical for me for capturing 360° images.

The Solution I’m Using Currently

I eventually opted to use OSMAnd’s built-in recording feature. By activating the setting, I could record my route in real-time and have the GPX displayed directly on the map. This way, while cycling, I could instantly see where I had already been and decide on the fly which streets to cover next. This flexibility worked much better for capturing pictures around Salzburg.

Managing the Photos for Upload

From past experience, I knew that the Mapillary uploader struggles when handling too many files at once, leading to issues that require a full reset of the uploading-tool.

To avoid this, I used PowerShell to split the images into folders of 250 files each, which made the upload much smoother and basically error-free. This small step ensured that I could process and upload my imagery without hiccups.

I also had to manually go through the pictures to remove duplicates—like when I was stopped at a red light or when I was checking something on my smartphone.

Next Steps and Reflections

At this stage, I’ve started covering significant areas of Salzburg, and I hope the community can benefit from the 360° imagery I captured. These images can help solve local OSM notes and improve map quality, especially for features that are difficult to verify using satellite imagery alone.

As for what’s next, I plan to continue capturing more parts of the city and eventually upload everything to Mapillary. I’m also hoping for the establishment of a DACH Panoramax instance, so I can upload my images there instead of to Mapillary. In the meantime, if anyone has suggestions for better route planning tools or tips for working with large amounts of 360° imagery, feel free to reach out!

Let’s keep filling the map with new discoveries—one street at a time!