Regardless of whether capturing with your mobile phone or some other camera, there are a few basic rules for capturing for Mapillary. Further below in this article, you'll find some extra guidelines as well as tips specific to capturing on foot, by bicycle, or by car.

 

📖Table of Contents

1. The Three Basic Rules of Capturing
2. What and what not to Capture
3. How to strategically capture a large area
4. Advanced usage tips
5. Walking tips
6. Cycling tips
7. Driving tips
8. Equipment for advanced captures

 

📓The Three Basic Rules of Capturing

 

1. When capturing, keep on moving and to try to hold the camera still, pointing in one direction.

2. Images should be in landscape orientation. Adjust the camera to be level with the horizon (the Mapillary apps have tilt lines on the camera screen to help with that).
3. Normally you aim the camera towards the direction of movement, where the road in front of you meets the horizon, unless you're interested specifically in a side view.

 

📸What and what not to capture

Do capture:

• Clean, unobstructed views on the street level
• Streets, bike paths, pedestrian paths (in the direction of the road/path)
• Buildings (front facade view)
• Squares, parks and open areas
• Anything else noteworthy or interesting about a place

Most times, taking images in the direction you are moving, of the road in front of you, is the best view. In some cases, a side view can be more interesting. You decide. There is no limit on the level of detail, you can take as many images as you like.

 

 

 

🏙️How to strategically capture a large area

When you’re interested in getting systematic coverage of an area on Mapillary, there are some extra tips for you besides the general tips for capturing. These are useful regardless of whether you are working alone, or a part of organization working longer-term to attain complete coverage of an entire city or neighborhood.

1. Plan your route in advance. If you aim to cover a big area, divide it into smaller sections and think through how much you can do at a time.
2. Work out the most interesting aspects of the route and determine the best way to capture them. Do you need to make multiple passes past the same landmark or building?
3. Decide on your mode of transport. This depends on the size of the area you are photo mapping. From this, you can decide whether it is best to approach the task on foot, by bike or by car.
4. Decide on which devices you'll use: Will mobile phones or 360° cameras work best for the scale of the project and resources available? What's your mounting strategy?
5. Prepare your devices beforehand: make sure the batteries are charged and you have enough storage space. See that you have installed the Mapillary app (or any external apps you may be using) beforehand, if you're capturing a place with spotty cell service. If you plan a longer mapping session, think about charging opportunities (like car chargers or power banks) and extra storage (like micro-SD cards or periodically transferring the images to a computer or an external memory device).
6. Divide and conquer: if you have a group of mappers, divide into groups to cover the area, section by section. 
7. Decide on how you upload. Make sure you have WiFi available when you need it (by default, Mapillary apps will never attempt upload on mobile data). If you're using an action camera or 360° camera, you'll have to use the Mapillary Desktop Uploader. 

Some examples of organizations that have done large Mapillary mapping projects include the Red Cross (the Missing Maps project), World Bank (infrastructure in Dar es Salaam), and OpenPompeii (cultural heritage hackathon).

Collecting Mapillary coverage in Maseru for the #MapLesotho sessions

 

🏆Advanced usage tips

• Avoid capturing in the rain and in low-light situations. The images will turn out much worse than what you see with the human eye.

• Keep a consistent angle of the camera. Most times you would keep it pointing straight ahead, although sometimes you may want to capture e.g. at a 90- or 45-degree angle with respect to your direction of moving. If you change the camera angle mid-capture, the sequences will end up looking jumpy and "dizzy".

• If you keep or mount the camera steady, you can lock the compass angle to the direction your device is pointing, instead of using the device's compass that might be affected by disturbances. There's a little arrow or compass icon at the top right of the app's Capture screen for changing that this setting.

• Turn off WiFi and Bluetooth to save battery while you capture. You might want to use a power bank (or a phone charger, if in a car) for extra power supply.

• For longer capture sessions, consider extra micro-SD cards to expand the memory available for capture (if your device supports it).

• Keep in mind that if you capture images that are several hundreds of meters apart from each other, they will be split into separate sequences after upload on our system. This may make it inconvenient for you to get an overview of your imagery later (both in the list on your profile and visualized on the map, where they'll only be represented by single dots).

 

🚶‍♂️Walking tips

• Try to keep the camera in line with the horizon. It's a bit harder when walking compared to other modes of moving, but the tilt lines on the camera screen will help you.
• You can try putting the phone in a pouch around your neck or taped on your chest. That should help keep the camera steady.
• You might also want to use a selfie stick which might be more comfortable to hold than the phone itself

🚲Cycling tips 

Mobile phones are not the best choice when you want to capture while cycling. One reason is that your phone may quite easily pop out of the mount and get damaged. The other reason is that phones are usually not good at handling motion blur. We recommend that you use an action camera instead.

If you still decide to use your phone when cycling, here's what you should keep in mind. Use a sturdy mount to attach the phone horizontally to your bike handlebar. Check that no parts of the bike are visible in the view.

• Ride slow and preferably on smooth surfaces. This has two reasons: to reduce blur that results from shocks absorbed by the bike and to make sure your phone doesn’t pop out of the holder.
• To be on the safe side, we strongly suggest that you use rubber bands or lanyards to secure your phone to the mount.

🚘Driving tips

Regardless of the camera you have, you'll want to mount it. 

If using an interior car mount, try to make sure that neither the mount itself nor any parts of the car are in the camera view. Sometimes this can be hard, depending on the car, but a position near the rear view mirror usually works best. The position of the mount also affects potential glare from the dashboard (that will be visible in your images). You can also try a few other tricks for reducing glare: Remove any lighter objects from your dashboard. Cover the dashboard with a black matt cloth (like felt). Try a DIY polarizer filter. You can use a lens from disposable 3D glasses from the cinema—cut it out and tape it over your camera lens. You might want to try rotating and turning it around to find the position that works best for you.

 

Mounting your camera externally is the preferred option, if it's possible. Of course, do NOT mount your phone outside of your vehicle.

You can achieve really good results in terms of both quantity and quality of images by using a 360 camera, action camera, or a rig of several cameras that you mount externally to the car. 

Always be cognizant of underpass clearance heights in your area if you're mounting atop of a vehicle!

 

🔋Equipment for advanced captures

• Mounts
  
  • • See our in-depth list of recommended smartphone mounts 
  • Walking:
    • For action cameras, it is best to use a body mount (chest or head). A selfie stick is recommended for 360° cameras.
  • For multiple camera angles, you can mount several action cameras and 360° cameras at once.

• Memory/SD cards
  It is important to have enough memory on your device to store your photos after capturing. Mobile phones should have enough internal storage. One image takes roughly 2–8 MB, giving you about 1000–4000 images if you have 8 GB of free storage on your phone. For devices like action cameras and 360° cameras, we recommend inserting an SD card with around 128 GB, so you can capture as many images possible.
  
  
• Charging
  It is important to fully charge all of your devices prior to capturing. When you have multiple devices to charge prior to capturing, we recommend a multi-port USB charging station, although this is optional.
  
  
• Power supply
  It is equally important to keep your devices powered during your capture session. For shorter sessions, your device’s internal battery may be sufficient to last the duration of your session. For longer sessions, consider an external charging pack for each device, or a car charger if your situation allows for it.
  
  
• Protective cases
  Most action cameras are built to withstand rough conditions. If you want to protect your device further, you might consider buying a protective case for it.

Can I use drones?

Mapillary is a platform for street-level imagery. Using drones to capture images for Mapillary is fine as long as you fly at low altitude. Below ~5 meters the images blend nicely with images taken at street level. Use a suitable camera that can handle vibration, for example, a GoPros. Mounting phones on drones is not a good idea because of the rolling shutter effects from vibration.