Panoramax

Panoramax
Author:	Panoramax Team
License:	MIT License
Platform:	Web
Version:	2.7.0 [1] (2024-10-10)
Languages:	English, Danish, German, Swedish, Esperanto, French, and Italian
Website:	Panoramax.fr
Source code:	https://gitlab.com/panoramax
Programming languages:	JavaScript and Python
"The free alternative to photo-mapping territories"
Features Feature Value Map Display Display map yes Map data ? Source ? Rotate map no 3D view no Shows website ? Shows phone number ? Shows operation hours ? Routing Routing no Create route manually ? Calculate route ? Create route via Waypoints ? Routing profiles ? Turn restrictions ? Calculate route without Internet (Offline routing) ? Routing providers ? Avoid traffic ? Traffic Provider ? Navigating Navigate no Find location ? Find nearby POIs ? Navigate to point ? Navigation with voice / Voice guidance ? Keep on road ? Lane guidance ? Works without GPS ? Navigate along predefined route ? Tracking Make track ? Customizable log interval ? Track formats ? Geotagging photo Fast POI buttons ? Upload GPX to OSM ? Monitoring ? Editing Add POIs no Edit / Delete POIs no Add way ? Edit geometries no Edit arbitrary tags of existing OSM objects no Edit relations no View notes ? Create notes ? Edit notes ? Work offline no Support imagery offset DB ? Upload to OSM no Rendering ? Accessibility ?

Panoramax is a federation offering geolocated street-level pictures. Pictures are offered through a decentralized architecture, with a set of free and open-source tools. In other words, it is "like a self-hosted Street View" that does not impose its own app and gives you the right to fork the server.

This wiki page describes the software and the ecosystem. To link an image on Panoramax from OpenStreetMap, see panoramax=*.

The main selling points are:

• self-hostable, as a public instance or in your private organization
• free-licensed server (unlike Mapillary or Mapilio)
• freedom to choose or develop your favorite client app
• federation through a meta-catalog, which gives a single entrypoint (API, web viewer) to all publicly available servers

Instances

Services

Panoramax 360° photo showing the contributions of zorglubu in France. CC-BY-SA-4.0

Some services store in-app uploads on custom Panoramax servers, which means that photos are accessible not only through an in-browser slippy map (i.e. the default Panoramax frontend), but also via the federation API, the Panoramax API, and the STAC API.

URL	Region	Publicly viewable	Publicly editable	License	Other notes
https://api.panoramax.xyz	🌐 Global	Yes	No	Mixed	The meta-catalog list all pictures available across the public federation. After uploading an image, you may have to wait some time before it is visible on the meta-catalog. (The `api` part of the URL is important. Without it, you're redirected to https://panoramax.fr/)
https://panoramax.openstreetmap.fr	🇫🇷 France (and outside for tests)	Yes	Yes, with OSM-account	CC-BY-SA 4.0 (see below)	by OSM France In the short term, OSM FR can host pictures from the outside of France, but worldwide coverage is not sustainable in the long term, due to storage limits (and costs). Therefore, it is preferred that other local communities set up their own federated instances.
https://panoramax.ign.fr	🇫🇷 France	Yes		etalab-2.0	by Institut national de l'information géographique et forestière
https://panoramax.mapcomplete.org	🌐 Global	Yes	Yes, but only via https://mapcomplete.org, requires OSM-account	CC-BY-SA 4.0	Images uploaded in MapComplete are stored here

OSM-France adopted CC-BY-SA for the pictures, but also grant a right to create non photographic derivates under CC-BY or ODbL.

Community

• Panoramax forum
• Panoramax mapstodon
• Panoramax telegram translation group
• Panoramax OSM forum Android App
• Peertube
• On Lemmy
• On Reddit

Deploy your own instance

Check list

Tagging

panoramax=* - Associate a Panoramax picture to an OSM feature.

Contribute

Panoramax docs contribute

Development

Mobile App

• Android mobile app for taking and uploading pictures (with its discussion forum thread)
• Baba - alternative Android and iOS mobile app for taking Panoramax pictures

Translation

• Panoramax Weblate used for translation
• Telegram Panoramax translation group
• Panoramax translation docs

Software

As Panoramax is a federation, the main matter is to agree on standards. Servers have to offer their pictures through a STAC API. Beyond that, any compliant server can be a part of Panoramax.

Main software used for Panoramax is listed below.

Server-side

All servers are running under the Panoramax API, which is fully free and open-source. It's a Python and Flask API, relying on a PostgreSQL database with PostGIS. It handles users, as well as uploading and serving of pictures.

Client-side

Many clients can be made available for Panoramax, as long as they accept STAC and/or WFS servers.

Clients from the Panoramax project itself:

• Panoramax website, the front-end of public servers
• Panoramax web viewer, a stand-alone JS viewer
• Panoramax CLI interface, a Python-based CLI tool for uploading and downloading images

Clients using the standard STAC or WFS APIs:

• List of STAC-compatible clients

Third-party clients:

• Panoramax-js, a Typescript library with which one can upload images to a Panoramax instance and with some other API calls made available; developed and used by MapComplete
• MapComplete, an OSM editor and viewer, lets users browse nearby pictures from Panoramax and also upload pictures to Mapcomplete's own Panoramax instance. They moved all old images (hosted on imgur) to their panoramax-instance. This is documented in this issue
• OsmApp.org shows Panoramax-images as well but doesn't (yet) shows a correct attribution (as of 2024-11-21)
• QGis plugin: https://gitlab.com/panoramax/clients/qgis-plugin
• Panoramax for ArcGIS https://www.arcgis.com/home/item.html?id=97b27545e801478d9eb36d2a6fc9b63b
• A plugin for JOSM has been requested here on the JOSM issue tracker.
• Vespucci feature request is here
• overpass-turbo.eu links to panoramax.xyz when a panoramax-hash is detected
• Baba multiplatform mobile app: Google Play store

Use in OSM editors

iD integration

• iD support with ability to filter by capture date, contributor and image type has been implemented, see screenshot below

Work in progress:

• New features for iD will be available for testing here. iD support was initially requested here and was then a project in GSOC 2024; see the current state of implementation in this OSM diary entry by Juicio.
  • First pull request, already merged
  • Second pull request, work in progress

Statistics

• Panoramax stats

Panoramax Weblate

• Panoramax Weblate

Third-party viewers

• In MapComplete, click a map feature, then click "Browse nearby pictures" in the panel at the right. This includes the pictures from the Panoramax meta-catalog - so not only the pictures that were uploaded to MapComplete.

Made possible by

https://gitlab.com/panoramax/gitlab-profile/-/raw/develop/images/sponsors.png

See also

OSM wiki

• Panoramax talk at State of the Map Europe 2023 for the slides and the talk on YouTube
• List of OSM-based services
• Photo linking - Create links between OSM features and external pictures
• Street-level imagery services

Wikipedia

• Panoramax

Wikidata

• Wikidata Panoramax

External Websites

• Meta-catalog for all photos available
• Panoramax on GitLab

For developers

• List of clients
• Typescript/javascript library to log in (with a token) and upload images

To convert a panoramax-hash into the src for an image, query https://api.panoramax.xyz/api/search/?ids=<hash> which will give you a .json. A normal-sized image is available at features[0].assets.sd. Use .hd or .thumb for other sizes

Alternatively, one can use https://api.panoramax.xyz/api/pictures/{hash}/sd.jpg