The Mapillary community has had a great 2016, reaching 100M photos and much more. Let's look at some achievements from this year that are not on our regular leaderboard.

In the Mapillary community we work together to visualise the world and the places we love. The key activity is of course capturing photos, and in the middle of November we reached 100 million of them (108 million by now)! This is more than 2.45 million kilometres.

We have a leaderboard with the toplist of contributors in terms of the number of photos (that can also be filtered for each country), but in fact there are a number of stats that reflect the activeness of the community. In this post we'd like to present some of them for the year 2016.

Number of Edits

One of the core ideas of Mapillary is that anyone can contribute with a simple device such as a smartphone. Devices are getting better and better, but sometimes there are still problems with e.g. GPS accuracy (you can read up on it here) or compass angle... These things can be adjusted post-upload. In the spirit of OpenStreetMap, which we are great fans of, we call these corrections changesets—comprising of a set of corrections proposed at a time to the same sequence of photos.

Number of Blur Requests

When you upload photos to Mapillary, we blur faces and license plates for privacy reasons. But since the algorithm that does that is not yet perfect, some of these items get missed and some falsely detected. Everyone has the opportunity to fix those mistakes through our blur editor, and we're grateful to see that a lot of people invest their time in this. In addition to fixing the particular photos, these corrections also create data that the blur algorithm can learn from—so it's a double thankworthy job.

Number of Countries Photo Mapped

Have you ever seen people put pins (dots, flags, ...) on the world map for each country they've visited? It's fun to imagine our community members doing the same for each country they've captured in. Start to think of it, for the Mapillary community these maps would probably tend to look very similar. Travelling is just such a great opportunity to add to your collection of contributions!

Number of Mapping Days

Every once in a while we get questions about how often should one capture. And the answer is "as often as you'd like". Of course it's great if you can go to places no one has been before and get them on the photo map, but capturing your everyday routes several times has great value, too. For instance, you can track how your places change with the Mapillary Time Travel function. It's amazing to see that a number of our community members have spent more days in 2016 capturing than not capturing.

Number of Consecutive Mapping Days

When you capture a lot, there is the pleasant danger of really developing a habit. Mapillary team members are already very used to friends and family complaining that it's impossible to travel with us because we always take those extra minutes to set up a camera or insist on dining at a restaurant where the phone could be recharged for another mapping session. And we've heard the same from several community members—as is evident from below, some of them have been on long streaks of uploading every single day.

Sequences Taken Furthest Apart

As already mentioned, the Mapillary community are great travellers. In fact, people literally take photos nearly at the opposite "ends" of the globe (allegedly the longest distance between any two points on earth is 20,036 km).

Number of Comments Made

It's great to capture photos, but it's also great to explore what other people have contributed. We can't measure how much time anyone spends on virtual travels (I personally could forget myself to browse around the world for ages), but we have some data about how often people make a little stop in the virtual tour to say hi (or something else) to the person who has shared the place they're currently exploring. It's a great way to connect with the people who share your mission.

We hope these achievements inspire you to be active in the Mapillary community in 2017. Regardless of whether featured in a toplist or not, every single contribution counts and is an important part of how great Mapillary is. A huge thanks to the whole Mapillary community, and have an awesome end to the year!

/Katrin and the Mapillary team