mapillary-tools 0.0.4

Mapillary Commandline Image Uploader

Commandline tools to upload discrete images to Mapillary. Does not support videos.

Rewrite

This is a rewrite of a portion of the official Mapillary tools found at: https://github.com/mapillary/mapillary_tools

The official Mapillary tools are broken because Python 2 is dead. Major distributions have already removed Python 2 from their standard installation. An official Python 3 port has been requested in May 2018 but has not materialized so far.

A quick look at the official code shows that it is not worth porting anyway. That code was obviously written by lots of different people with varying understanding of Python and then duct-taped together to make it look like one application. It also pulls in way too many dependencies, like a full image manipulation library, 2 different Exif libraries (one of them custom patched) and an advanced keystore.

The rewritten code uses Python 3 and only a few external libraries.

This code does not change your image files, neither does it copy them around. All data and housekeeping information is kept in small sidecar files, one file per image. This keeps your disk lean and your backups small. The sidecar files contain JSON, so debugging is easy.

Usage

0. Install:

   pip install mapillary-tools

1. Authorize: This will prompt for your Mapillary password:

   mapillary_auth.py --user_name <your_username> --user_email <your_email>

   This step is needed only once. Your credentials are now stored in the file ~/.config/mapillary/configs/<CLIENT_ID>. Keep this file secret. Mapillary credentials do not expire.

2. Pre-process the images:

   mapillary_process.py ~/Pictures/Mapillary/*.jpg

   This step extracts GPS data from your images and stores it in sidecar files.

3. Upload the images:

   mapillary_upload.py ~/Pictures/Mapillary/*.jpg

   The script remembers which images were successfully uploaded. If you run the upload script on the same images again, the ones already uploaded will not be uploaded again.

4. Cleanup:

   mapillary_process.py --clean ~/Pictures/Mapillary/*.jpg

   Delete all sidecar files. Caution: This will erase all memory about which files where already uploaded.

Run the scripts with ‘-h’ to see more options.

Videos

This software has no support for videos.

To split a video file into images use ffmpeg, then use exiftool to set the exif timestamp.

Proposed workflow:

mkdir -p /tmp/frames
# extract I-frames for better clarity
ffmpeg -i ~/Videos/dash.mp4 -vf "select='eq(pict_type,PICT_TYPE_I)'" -vsync vfr -frame_pts true /tmp/frames/%08d.jpg
# figure out the start time and frame rate
ffprobe -v quiet ~/Videos/dash.mp4 -print_format json -show_streams
# set the same start time on all files
exiftool '-AllDates=2020:01:01 00:00:00' /tmp/frames/
# increment time according to frame number
exiftool '-AllDates+<0:0:${FileName;$_=substr($_,0,8)/30}' /tmp/frames/

See:

• https://trac.ffmpeg.org/wiki/Create%20a%20thumbnail%20image%20every%20X%20seconds%20of%20the%20video

• https://exiftool.org/Shift.html

GPS Tracks

This software has no support for syncronizing to GPS tracks.

To syncronize your images to a GPS track use you can use exiftool.

Proposed workflow:

exiftool -geotag=track.gpx /tmp/frames

See: https://exiftool.org/geotag.html