How to contribute?

There are many ways to contribute to Panoramax, here is a quick overview on different ways to join our community ✨

💝 Share your pictures

The most obvious way to contribute to Panoramax is to share pictures. It's quite easy to do.

📷📱 Choose a camera

Take pictures - 360° or not - with a simple smartphone or any other more sophisticated device.

Panoramax have some requirements on the metadata associated to the picture:

• a position 📍
• a capture time ⏲️

Those metadata are usually automatically set by the camera (in what is called exif tags) if the camera has a means to get the position. For some complex use cases, those tags can also be given alongside the picture to the uploading API.

More metadata can be associated to the pictures, learn more about those in the dedicated documentation section.

For 360° pictures, there are quite a lot of available action cameras that have good quality. It's easier if the camera has an integrated GPS, else you will need an external GPS, or even better a RTK receiver, for better accuracy.

Some tutorial have been gathered in the french panoramax forum (in 🇫🇷 french though).

📸 Take pictures

Panoramax accepts all street level pictures. They can be taken from a car 🚘, a bike 🚲, walking 🚶‍♀️ or whatever you want 🚣‍♂️🚆🛼.

Note that public Panoramax instances (see below) only accept pictures of the public space.

🌐 Choose where to share them

Panoramax is a decentralized system. Pictures are shared on what we call panoramax instance (see below how to create your own). Each instance will have its own set of rules and associated license.

For the moment there are 2 public instances, but we hope many more will spawn:

• French Geography Institute (IGN) server
• OpenStreetMap France server

Upload them

The easiest way to upload the picture is to use the website of the chosen Panoramax instance. For more complex use cases, a command line tool is available, you can check its documentation.

🖥️ Host you instance

You can check how to install a private or public Panoramax instance in the API section.

If you want to host a public Panoramax instance, you can open an issue on the federated catalog (where all public pictures can be seen), so your instance can be harvested.

Contribute to the development

Panoramax is a fully open source initiative, founded mostly by public money, and will stay so as we are not a VC startup📈.

There is a lot to do, and we'll welcome any contributions, be it code, issues, documentation, translation...

Use Panoramax

Discover and use photos shared by the community in the federated catalog, and exploit them for your needs while respecting the pictures license.