💝 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.
Tip
If you don't really know what to get, the community seems to agree with the GoPro Max as the current best value for money 360° camera.
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 stored and shared on what we call panoramax instance (see below how to create your own). Each instance has its own set of rules and associated license.
Public instances could be federated. Currently, the federated instances are as following:
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.