[OSM-Photos] OpenStreetView

[John McKerrell]

Hi

You are getting this email because at some point in the last 3 months  
you thought that photos + OSM = Interesting.

I think this is the first email on this list so it's quite apt, if a  
little late, for me to announce that the OpenStreetView project that I  
talked about at State of the Map is finally live. It's still very  
basic and only covers parts of what I talked about then but I think it  
has potential.

To try it out, head over to http://openstreetview.org/

You'll need to sign up for an account, verify your email address and  
then log in. Once in you will be able to upload photos either by  
uploading individual files in a web form or by creating an FTP account  
and FTPing files up. Obviously it would be nice to allow other  
methods, they will come later.

Once you've uploaded files you'll have to wait a minute or so for them  
to be processed, then you need to go to "your" homepage (click on your  
username) where you can check the thumbnails to make sure you uploaded  
the right files, then you will push the images on to moderation. You  
can moderate them yourself which entails masking out any faces or  
license plates or anything you think might be a privacy problem, once  
you're happy click on the "Mark as: Safe" link and save your changes.  
It will confirm you're happy marking it as safe and then hide the  
images ready for you to request some more. Once three people  
(potentially including you) have marked them as safe they will be made  
available on the map on the front page for anyone to view, there's  
also a basic KML feed. Even if you don't have files to upload it would  
be useful for you to go on there anyway and moderate the photos I've  
already uploaded and any that anyone else uploads.

Currently you can't geotag images within the site so you'll need to do  
it before you upload, the site will read the exif headers. Ironically  
I haven't done this myself so there's only a couple of images in there  
at the moment, hopefully I'll get time to upload a few bigger batches  
later today or tomorrow.

FYI I'll be talking about this at the AGI conference in Stratford-upon- 
Avon in the UK this week, I'd love there to be as many photos as  
possible available for viewing by then :-)

Finally, the code is all open source, I've stuck it in github to  
hopefully make it really easy for people to contribute back. You can  
sign up for an account for free, clone the OpenStreetView repository,  
make changes and then request that I take the changes into the main  
code, which I'll be happy to do. I'm really hoping this is something  
that will interest people and that they will get involved in extending  
the code to get some more features in. If you want to take a look, you  
can find it here: http://github.com/johnmckerrell/OpenStreetView

Please take a look and let me know you're thoughts, it's pretty basic  
at the moment and I'm sure there's lots of bugs, but hopefully it's  
going to be of some use pretty soon.

John