KartaView

Anyone can contribute street-level photos to KartaView with a smartphone and its open-source apps, and anyone can use them.¹ It is offered by Grabtaxi Holdings Pte. Ltd. (Grab) under Singapore law, and its terms say KartaView collects, stores and distributes georeferenced street-view imagery and spatial 3D data to help the OpenStreetMap community improve its map.² Use is free of charge.² Its documented API and its photo storage sit at openstreetcam.org addresses, and its GitHub organisation holds a repository named openstreetcam.org.^3,4,6

Contributors record with the KartaView app or a GPS-enabled camera such as a recent GoPro, mounted to see the road ahead from a car, motorbike or bike, and upload camera photos with a command-line tool.^1,5 Recordings at night or blurred ones are rejected.¹ Computer vision blurs faces and number plates, which can take one to two days before the photos are public.¹ KartaView detects features such as signs, lanes and road curvature in the photos.¹ It has also released a 360-degree imagery dataset of Yogyakarta, Langkawi and Krabi collected by GrabMaps with its KartaCam2 camera, and contributors can link a Mapillary account so that one upload appears on both platforms.¹

The API serves photos, sequences, coverage map tiles and searches by location without a token; uploads, user profiles and private content need an access token, obtained by signing in with Google, Facebook or OpenStreetMap.³ The documentation also covers 3D and point-cloud uploads and viewing.³ Each photo record gives its position, time, heading, GPS accuracy, size and links to the processed image.⁶ The home page points to plugins for the iD and JOSM map editors.¹

The terms license the street images and 3D spatial data under Creative Commons Attribution-ShareAlike 4.0 and the code under the MIT licence.² Anyone may copy, distribute and adapt the data if they follow the licence and use the credit "© Grab and KartaView Contributors".² Grab gives no guarantee of the accuracy of the content and may suspend access at any time.²

For someone modelling a road network or a neighbourhood, KartaView is another source of dated street photos, licensed for reuse and for OpenStreetMap work, and worth checking where Mapillary or Panoramax are thin.