Video upload

We have been getting a lot of feedback from the beginning about using video for Mapillary (we are looking at you action camera users!). Chris, a community member wrote an excellent blog post on a workflow that allows to upload photos extracted from video to Mapillary. While this workflow is amazing, we thought there should be a simpler way to do just that.

To contribute to Mapillary using your video captures you need two things: the mp4 video file with your journey and a .gpx file that contains the track for what you have recorded in the video.

To upload, all you have to do is to select the video file, then the .gpx file. Afterwards you will be asked to synchronize the start of the video with the moment in the .gpx track, this is an important step and will allow us to process your sequence correctly. All you have left to do is to press the upload and wait for a virtual high five from us. We will notify you as soon as the processing is done, so everyone can enjoy your contributions! You can find a short screencast of the whole video upload flow below.

Manual upload improvements

We have received a lot of feedback about the manual upload and while working on the video upload we took time to improve it as well. Often people are not sure of the state of their upload: Was it uploaded correctly? Has it been processed? What happened to my script upload? We heard you!

In this version of the manual upload, it's easier to see the current state of your upload, like whether you have some photos uploaded, but not published. You can also easily review the photos before and after uploading (in case you change your mind about publishing some of the photos, for example if they are too far from one another, etc.).

Upload Process

Below is a high level overview of what happens when you upload to Mapillary.

1. You select you images and attempt to upload them. Here we process the EXIF data and check whether they meet requirements (GPS location is a requirement; you can't manually upload images taken with one of our apps). In case of any errors, you will be notified and these photos won't be uploaded. You can get a preview of the sequence and positions of the photos on the map; at this stage you can delete a photo, so it won't get uploaded.
2. Next you upload the photos to our servers. The photos do not get automatically published. Here you can still review the sequence of photos, remove some of them, or remove the whole sequence. Nothing else is left to do, but uploading! In case the connection drops during the upload, we retain the photos you have uploaded and you will be able to continue afterwards. You can do so by refreshing the page or finding your way to Manual Upload through the website menu.
3. Finally, publish your newly created sequence of photos! At this stage you have an option to publish to a private project. In case you don't have any, your photos will be available to the public. So the last thing you need to do is to press the 'publish' button.

We know that not everyone has a super fast connections and oftentimes it's about priorities (do I watch Netflix or should I upload to Mapillary?), so we wanted to make uploads as resilient as possible, you can upload as little or as much as possible, you can upload in small batches across few days or dump thousands of photos in a short burst.

We hope you enjoy the video upload and revamped manual uploads as much as we do. We can't wait to see your video and non-video uploads! Care to give some feedback? You can reach us through usual channels: Twitter and GitHub Issues.

Happy uploading,
Kamil & the Mapillary Team