Mapillary’s street-level imagery is directly available for OpenStreetMap editing in JOSM, making it possible to add details to the map that can’t be seen from aerial imagery or imported data. We are planning a series of upgrades to make the tool more powerful and the editing process smoother. This newly released first round of upgrades includes more precise filters, organization login and toggling, automatic changeset tagging with Mapillary as a source, and several improvements to the look and feel of the plugin.

Do you use Mapillary together with your organization? While previous JOSM versions allowed login to Mapillary in the preferences menu, the new release takes this into account by allowing you to filter imagery from your organization. This is helpful for viewing only images uploaded by you and your colleagues—whether it’s your local OSM community, a city government like Detroit, or a company that captures imagery at scale with a fleet.

If you need to filter imagery by date, the process just became more effective. Previous versions allowed filtering by a specific amount of time before today’s date: three weeks ago, one year ago, six months ago. Now this is enhanced with the option to choose a specific date range, just like on the Mapillary web app. This helps reduce the density of Mapillary imagery in the map view, while also letting you stay focused on a timeframe that matters for your editing.

Mapillary is automatically tagged as a source in your changeset when you use the imagery during editing, and we also make sure the imagery is in the vicinity of your edits, rather than marking Mapillary as the source for an edit where no imagery is adjacent. This will help Mapillary contributors find out about where their imagery has helped fix the map, and makes it easy for you to search for Mapillary as a source on tools like OSMCha.

Traffic signs, which Mapillary’s technology automatically detects in images, are available globally in JOSM, and are crucial to adding speed limits, turn restrictions, and other road information. As an improvement, you can now click the traffic sign icon under the Mapillary viewer in order to view a box indicating the traffic sign in the photo corresponding to the selection on the map.

Some other small updates include fixes to the interface, such as changing the green color for Mapillary and updating icons, as well as a slight performance upgrade in 360° image viewing, some crash fixes, and moving Mapillary to the bottom of the layer ordering by default. For more technical notes, see the release notes on Github.

We have more updates to come in the near future, and welcome any feedback you have for the team. Feel free to get in touch with suggestions, and share examples on social media of how you’re using Mapillary in JOSM. As always, happy mapping!

/Chris, Solutions Engineer