Hi there,

I’m interested in helping OSM to start towards some kind of street view like service, which seems eminantly doable now that Androids standard camera app, allows for super easy taking of panoramic, full spherical style images.

Just having some trouble figuring out the most effective place to upload these?

• Theres opentrailmap.org, but then they only seem to want off road paths, parks etc.
• There’s openlinkmap, but they only seem to be looking at adding this functionality at some time and even then they don’t seem to have anywhere to upload the images
• there’s openstreetview.org which looks promising, but as though it’s been dead for years. Really this is the kind of thing I’m looking for, but is there anything more active?
• Then there seems to be some discussion about adding to OSM directly with the tags image=File:example.jpg and image:panorama=yes where example.jpg is your file uploaded to wikimediacommons. This looks like the most logical and promising, but will anywhere actually display these? the image tag is also marked as controversial, so will it stick around?

So where would you think to add street level, “Street View” style images into OSM so they’re most likely to be useful?

I’ve been trying to find an efficient method for adding street numbers, but so far every workflow I’ve found has been rather horrific.

I like vespucci, but it’s a lot of clicks to create each node and type in each number. I thought I’d found a possible solution when I came across keypad mapper 3 for Android. Trouble is, for something designed specifically for this purpose, the interface is still pretty unwieldy.

I put quite a bit of time, thought and effort into mocking up a better user interface and posted it here almost a month ago to no response at all: osm.wiki/Talk:Keypad-Mapper_3#Faster_GUI_Mockup_for_Most_Common_Use_Cases

Worse than that, Keypad Mapper 3 positions the nodes all over the place. On the street it’s a neat , regular 10 meters or so between each house and each number goes up by 2. In the OSM file it makes, Often the node for one house might be 50 meters away from each other or more. When importing into JOSM sometimes it’s hard to even tell which street the node is supposed to be on!

The GPS on my Nexus 5 phone’s other apps, seem to function with good accuracy.

So does anyone here map street numbers regularly and have a decent workflow for this?

Thanks!

RLT

Who’s developed an automatic habit, of trying to remember any local mailbox / public phone / store or new sign spotted while driving to add to OSM later? This thing is addictive!

The nice thing is, that it stops you from just becoming blasé and not noticing the local area you live in. I find myself paying more attention and seeing more of where I live than I did when I first moved here.

Now, it’s time to go and add those public phones / mail boxes I memorized today…

Hey all,

Reasonably long time member, but only pretty recently getting into any real mapping. So after trying Google maps Android app lately, I was struck by how mind alteringly useful it is being able to look up local businesses and have their website, opening hours and phone number available, so I’ve been trying to find a workflow for quickly getting this same info into OSM wherever I go.

For adding stores, the OSM editing plugin does a great job with an interface that lets you search for appropriate tags, and often to not even need to know what tag to use because they have a field there. The main problem is that while it’s great for adding a new store, that there doesn’t seem to be any way to edit it, so if you make even a single mistake… you’ll need to find another way to fix it.

That let me to Vespucci. The current version in Fdroid crashes when trying to bring up the edit tags dialoge. An email to the dev revealed that they basically grabbed a random code snapshot, compiled it and threw it in. Getting the actual latest release fixed this nicely. Vespucci is fabulous for being able to add any tag or detail you want. It also has a nice, if sometimes quirky set of presets where if you choose, say “restaurant” it will add all the appropriate tags for a restaurant for you to fill out. Currently it’s my favorite all ‘round tool, although with great power, often comes not being quite so quick for little edits, such as just adding a node with a street number. It still feels a bit clunky in much the same way that potlatch felt, compared to iD, but I really was impressed with how much I could do with a mobile interface though, including modifying relations, creating areas and more.

… See full entry