[OSM-talk] Facebook acquires crowdsourced mapping company Mapillary

[Mark Wagner]

On Fri, 19 Jun 2020 23:45:57 +0200
Florian Lohoff <f at zz.de> wrote:

> Hi Nick,
> 
> On Fri, Jun 19, 2020 at 11:47:01AM +0000, Nick Whitelegg wrote:
> > 
> > (Disclaimer: I am the developer of said project)
> > 
> > You can login using your OSM account.  
> 
> The issue is that once you start pushing stuff into any projects your
> storage expenses will kill you pretty fast.
> 
> https://www.backblaze.com/b2/cloud-storage-pricing.html
> 
> Thats 0.005$ per GB and Month. Thats *12 *1024 for a Terrabyte. Thats
> something like 60$ per Year per Terrabyte which sounds reasonable
> concerning disk costs. Costs per disk per lifetime and infrastructure
> to connect it to the IP Network.
> 
> Since late May i have produced:
> 
> flo at p4:/scratch/local/mapillary$ du -sh .
> 285G	.
> flo at p4:/scratch/local/mapillary$ find . -type f -iname "*.jpg" | wc -l
> 97407
> 
> So just pushing worth like 2 Weeks of taking street imagery will cost
> the Hoster about 20$ per year from now on. And i have pushed multiple
> terrabytes to Mapillary since 2014.
> 
> And thats just me. Put that to a global OSM perspective and you need
> serious funding for storing all that imagery, let alone the CPU cycles
> for your compute vision to blur faces and number plates.

Serious funding?  Yes.  Outrageous funding?  No.

Rough estimate:

* The CIA World Factbook says there are about 64 000 000 km of roads in
  the world.
* Google Street View takes 100 photos per km.
* A photosphere from my tablet, compressed using WebP at 50% quality
  takes 2.7 MB.

This is about 17 280 TB of storage to cover the entire world at Google
Street View quality.  It would cost $215 000 per month to store in
Amazon S3, or $89 000 per month in Backblaze B2.  It's well within the
capacity of someone like the Wikimedia Foundation.

-- 
Mark