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💝 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 has some requirements on the metadata associated with the picture:

  • a position 📍
  • a capture time ⏲️

This metadata is 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, these tags can also be given alongside the picture to the uploading API.

More metadata can be associated with the pictures, learn more about it 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 tutorials 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 a Panoramax instance (see below how to create your own). Each instance has its own set of rules and associated license.

Upload them

The easiest way to upload the pictures 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.