Thursday, March 07, 2019

Open Street View


One of the biggest draws of the Google Maps API is having access to Google's impressive Street View access around the world. If you want to provide your users with street level panoramic images then the Google Maps API is probably your best choice. However if you only need static street level images there are other options.

One such option is OpenStreetCam. OpenStreetCam is a platform for collecting and providing free and open street level imagery. OpenStreetCam is developed by Telenav. The main aim of the product it to provide georeferenced street view imagery to help people improve OpenStreetMap. The OpenStreetCam imagery can be used by anyone under a Creative Commons Attribution-ShareAlike licence. You are therefore free to copy and use OpenStreetCam on your own non-commercial maps.


Mapillary is probably the best known platform for capturing and sharing street level geo-tagged photographs. So far Mapillary, and its users, have collected 467 million images providing street level photographs of 6.7 million kilometers of roads.

The geo-tagged photos on Mapillary can also be used under a Creative Commons Attribution-ShareAlike 4.0 International License. If CC BY-SA doesn’t suit your needs you can also pay for a commercial license to access Mapillary imagery and derived metadata. You can find out more about the Mapillary API at Mapillary Developer Tools.

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