If you look at the user's profile that added it, does it by any chance say they work for Lyft? I've never seen that particular source before.
this post was submitted on 10 Feb 2025
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Oh wow, that opened up a can of worms!
Yes, the user does seem to work for Lyft, and their profile has a few links. One leads to:
"We have 3 kinds of data that owned by Lyft:
“Lyft telemetry data" – Lyft drivers GPS tracks
“Lyft-owned street-level imagery” - photos collected by cameras installed in our drivers' vehicles. This data is updated frequently. Photos are not older than a year, and sometimes even a month.
"Lyft-owned aerial imagery" – As for now it is Nearmap imagery. They do allow us to use their imagery for OSM edits by license.
"
I guess that explains it! Thanks for putting me in the right direction. It's a shame that they don't share and grant an open license to that imagery. Seems more updated than Google Streetview, and since Lyft uses OSM data, it only seems right to share.
I found this on the OSM wiki:
Lyft welcomes feedback and suggestions on improving the editing process. When members of the editing team receive feedback or comments on a changeset, it is considered a top priority to respond and make corrective action on their OSM edits if required. If you have any questions about the editing process, or a specific edit done by the Lyft team, please reach out by sending an email to dct-osm(at)lyft.com. Responses to inquiries received are typically sent within two business days. skudrashou_lyft and technician_lyft are acting as a primary contact person for the team.
While I admit having updated streetside images would be great, I might be too lazy to reach out to ask :D
@Showroom7561 @End0fLine
As much as I despise the business idea of "let's make taxis cheaper by running illegal taxi companies disguised as tech companies", if they use some of their ill gotten gains to improve #OpenStreetMap, then I'm a bit more forgiving I guess 😂
Yeah, it's really unfortunate that nearly all street-level imagery are either locked behind closed doors or have closed licenses.
I could use Mapillary, but that's owned by META. The rest are so lacking that it's not even worth the time to contribute to them or use their existing data set (but this is a chicken and egg situation).
I stopped using Mapillary because I just couldn't stand using a Meta product anymore. Panoramax has way less footage, but I started contributing to it myself and then using the footage in OSM.
Do you upload to Panoramax from within the MapComplete app or something else?
(Ooh, a wild mapcomplete mention!)
MapComplete is mostly for picturers about single elements. We run our own Panoramax server for those images, but don't generally accept ""real"" streetview imagery where one systematically captures whole stretches of road. Those can be sent to the instance hosted by the french community (for now).
Signed, the mapcomplete dev
Thanks for chiming in—this confirms my suspicion about the MapComplete instance of Panoramax.
An OpenStreetMap France representative on the official forums informs me that long term, the French community's instance is intended to host photos from France only.
Just a reminder: the OSM France instance accepts pictures outside of France only for testing… we won’t be able to globally store pictures from all over the world for limited storage reason.
This means unfortunately, from what I can tell, the rest of the world does not yet have a "home instance" for contributing stretches/sequences of street level imagery to Panoramax.
The way it was described to me on Mastadon was that, until your area has their own server, you can use the French server. It will work because each picture has its own consistent ID, which won't change once they are moved to a new server when it comes online. If they changed their mind, I didn't know.
I use the command line interface to upload mine, but the web UI is good as well, though a bit slower.
I have not been able to find it. It may have been on the US Slack, but I can not remember and am not logged in to that at the moment.
I will see if I can find the particular message where that was said.
Interesting. Which country?
Canada is where I've seen it.
I've seen it in the US as well.