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See the road before you ride it: street-level photos in the planner

· 3 min read
Massimo Di Stefano
Massimo Di Stefano
FastGIS author

The desktop planner has a new layer and a new widget, Street-level photos. Drag the 📸 camera onto the map, or switch the layer on and click one of its thin lines, and you see the picture a contributor took there. V does the same at the cross in the middle of the map. Google's own Street View is one click away, in a new tab, facing the same way.

Why​

A rider in the DMD2 group asked for an Open in Street View button in the planner. Riders check a junction, a track's surface or a ford on Street View before committing a route to it. Most of them do it the slow way, with a right-click, a new tab and a search. MyRoute-app has Google's pictures in its web planner, behind its Gold subscription.

Where the pictures come from​

From two open projects, read through our own server:

  • Panoramax, the federated commons run by IGN and OpenStreetMap France, with instances in other countries. It needs no key. It is strongest in France, with good coverage in many towns.
  • Mapillary, Meta's open-licensed collection. It has far more pictures, rural roads included. Near Eboli it has about a hundred within 2 km, where Panoramax has two.

Both are licensed CC BY-SA 4.0, so the widget names the contributor, the date and the licence under every picture and links to its page. Mapillary's pictures also carry its logo, as its terms ask. Our server keeps Mapillary's key, caches each coverage tile for a day and counts the day's requests: Mapillary allows 50,000 a day per application. When the count reaches 45,000 the layer says so, and it shows only the tiles it already has until midnight UTC.

Google's coverage is the most complete, but its terms do not allow its pictures inside a map that is not Google's. So the planner links to it rather than embedding it: Open in Google Street View ↗ is under every picture, in Identify and on every stop's card. It opens facing the way you were looking, or the way your route runs there.

What the widget does​

  • A 360° picture turns as you drag it; a flat one zooms and pans.
  • ◀ ▶ (or ← →) step to the previous and next picture of the same drive, keeping the direction you were looking. Arrows on the road at the bottom of the picture point at those pictures as you look around, as in Mapillary and Google; click one to go there. A marker on the map shows where the camera stood, its cone turning as you look around.
  • Face the route turns a 360° picture to the way your planned route runs at that point, when the picture is within 30 m of the route.
  • Identify now also says how many street-level photos lie within 50 m of the point you clicked, with Open.

What it cannot do yet​

Riding a whole route in pictures from the elevation profile, and seeing where the pictures stop, is the next step. The rider app does not have street-level photos yet. Where neither project has been, there is no picture. The Google link is still there.