Adding `image:menu` on resturants?

Recently, MapComplete by @Pieter_Vander_Vennet has added a support for adding a image of a restaurant menu (to their Panoramax instance). E.g. Node: ‪Vidikovac-Sljeme‬ (‪1239878107‬) | OpenStreetMap.

In changeset 157532200 @mueschel suggested that those might not be publishable without an explicit owner permission.

Thus, I’m seeking wider community view on the issue. While in that particular case I don’t see either a copyright problem nor an owner opposition (the menus are also printed on the outside of the object, and waiter had no problem with waiting for picture of the menus to be taken in from of them), nobody requested the staff to call the owner to ask for their opinion/permission.

So what is general opinion of those? Are links to images of restaurant menus allowed to be published in OSM? And if so, is it a good idea?
I see menus prominently published in many restaurant-review sites (e.g. restaurantguru.com) but I have not heard such complaints before.

While I’m impartial on that particular subject (actually, I find MapComplete an easiest webapp to collect pictures pertaining to OSM objects), there was somewhat related discussion about publishing internet passwords in OSM , which, while completely different subject, do have some surprisingly similar arguments.

So I guess the question boils down is publishing links to pictures of menus (or even publishing links to pictures of interior/exterior of the restaurants) closer to publishing opening_hours of the place, or closer to publishing internet passwords or sex/race of the owner?

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So, a general poll about whether links (in OSM) to images (outside of OSM, e.g. panoramax instance or amenity website) of restaurant menus are good idea:

  • Sure, why not, publish them always if you want
  • It’s fine if it is printed on the outside too, but not if only visible inside
  • Only should publish them if amenity makes it public on the Internet
  • Only if the owner (not waiter) gives explicit permission
  • Should never be publish such links in OSM
  • It’s complicated (please leave comment)
0 voters

I don’t see a direct relation to things like passwords or other sensitive information. I’m perfectly fine with having links to online resources such as webpages or PDFs that are already available on the internet.

But I see a case of plain copyright violation in some of the cases. For example I remember there is / was a POI with 10 links to photographs of individual pages of the printed menu in a nicely designed booklet. Usually these are done by a design company that sell the menus, but not the unlimited right to reproduce them. Taking and publishing detailed photos of them can be in direct violation of these terms. That would be a legal problem not for OSM itself, but for the individual publishing these images.

Regarding Panoramax, this kind of picture is far from the concept of street level imagery.

As long as we have no way to qualify pictures as being indoor, documents or more generally non street level ones, we should avoid this kind of use of Panoramax.

What about images like this? (I took this one, of the exterior of a food truck)

I often see menus posted in the windows of restaurants that are clearly meant to be visible to people passing by on the street.

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AFAIK, MapComplete uses Panoramax for these use cases due to Imgur ToS not allowing use by MC anymore. @Pieter_Vander_Vennet might be able to provide an answer to this.

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While I don’t have much experience on this topic, if copyrighted images would be uploaded to some image hosting service, and subsequently linked to OSM, would OSM even face legal issues here? I’m inclined to say respecting copyright law is the responsibility of the individual.

For people who are picky about food or have dietary requirements, images of menus can be a massive help when planning where to go eat. IMO, the benefits far outweight the risks here.

Also: good job on implementing this into MapComplete!

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There a substantial difference between taking the photo and publishing it, as the OSMF is not actually hosting it though it is mainly an issue for the mapper in question.

That said I would note that we are not running a business directory here and having a link to the website in OSM should be far more than enough detail (at least that is likely to change less often than the menu).

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That would be the reason I would think they shouldn’t be listed in OSM - menu’s frequently change during the year.

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Regardless of all the other issues, if this question is fundamentally a legal one, this is not something to be resolved with a forum vote.

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While I don’t expect OSM to face any legal issues with photographs hosted on other websites, I think it advisable to only point to official sources simply for reasons of availability. If the linked image is legally problematic, then it might just be deleted without notice and suddenly we have a dead link.

Of course that restarts the debate over imperfect data vs no data at all.

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I would push for a more generic “menu” tag - when including official online ones, it’s more common to have them in the HTML or PDF formats :slight_smile:

website:menu is already used about 12,000 times.

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website:menu= was mainly populated by a mass addition to ~1k level in 2023. The growth later on is from iD. id-tagging-schema/CHANGELOG.md at main · openstreetmap/id-tagging-schema · GitHub
lunch:menu:url= was once suggested together (the menu here has a double meaning with a set menu) Proposal:Key:lunch - OpenStreetMap Wiki
I believe the idea means format-agnostic linking to webpage, PDF, pic, and any format in a single menu= / etc, instead of splitting between website:menu= and image:menu= by content. Indeed eg menu:url= could be used in this method.
Interestingly, there are some .jpg used in website= now. This is besides how .pdf is common there.
website:*= has problems with website:booking= competing with reservation= (and confusing as Booking.com), and website:reservation= competing with reservation:*=
The original idea is quite old, and outdated in some (eg *:wikipedia=wikipedia= , *:photo=image= , *:webcam=contact:webcam=). url was actually raised against it, and opening_hours:url= was mentioned there. website:*= seems mostly ignored until recent years. Proposal:External links - OpenStreetMap Wiki

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Organic Maps also recently added support for displaying & editing website:menu.

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Absolutely. That is why feedback is requested. If there are legal precedents that taking / publishing pictures of menus is illegal in some jurisdictions, linking to those would be quite informative and might influence the choices of MapComplete (and others).

I have not perhaps emphasized enough that MapComplete uses it’s own custom instance of Panoramax (https://panoramax.mapcomplete.org/) for different purpose than most other instances (i.e. no street imagery, but specific POIs only), so use of “Panoramax” above was to be taken in meaning “Panoramax as an open source code stack” and not as panoramax.openstreetmap.fr street-imagery-oriented instance”

Agreed that it is preferable (when available), but that was not the question here.
Many a fast food / pub / restaurant (at least around here) don’t have a web site (or even a facebook/instagram page), and many of those that do aren’t really updating them that much (or at all) with new (or any) menus / prices (e.g. in Croatia you can still find plenty of last menu pictures in Croatian Kunas, even if we switched to Euro years ago. And many of those that do updates will at most only post a few pics/videos a year of birthday parties or live music at a restaurant that doubles as a night club, or invites for special events etc).

So I get it that the (uploaded by any random OSM user, so not depending on amenity’s owner knowledge/resources) picture of the menu would be helpful in such (numerous) cases where updated officially published menus are non-existent (or obsolete), which is why (I guess) mapcomplete asks for pictures of those.

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I voted “It’s fine if it is printed on the outside too, but not if only visible inside” following the logic of: the restaurant staff chooses who to accept as customers - who they will seat at a table and give a menu to. If a menu isn’t posted publicly on the outside, then – by analogy with arguments raised in favour of the community consensus seen in the wifi password thread – we should not assume they wish to have it public.

An analogy: we have toilets:wheelchair=yes/no/limited and wheelchair:description=*, but we probably wouldn’t do toilets:wheelchair:image=*, even though it could be a lot more descriptive than 255 characters of text in wheelchair:description=*.

So maybe we could use diet:description=* or menu:description=* or cuisine:description=* with text for those who have dietary requirements? A text description could also be easier to machine-translate into other languages than an image.

You could, however it can never include all information. We might not have toilets:wheelchair:image=*, but we do have highly specific tagging from the OnWheels app, and we frequently have image=* tags on all kinds of objects. The information I’m thinking about here are dietary restrictions (however those can be tagged with diet:*=*), allergens (not all of which can currently be tagged) and simple preferences, which differ so wildly between people that you can never write a proper description of a menu to suit all use cases.

Also, an image of a menu can serve as a first impression of a place.

I don’t know about others, but for me, being able to see the full menu of a place before going there is almost a necessity.

Main downside of linking images is that they currently almost never have alt text, leading to poor accessibility.

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Given that this likely involves copyright violations by reproducing the menu without permission, I don’t think such images should be linked from OSM. Even if we could argue that it’s publishing the image which is illegal, not linking to it, the idea still seems to rely on some other party systematically violating copyright on our behalf.

(Also, on a more practical note: Most menus have multiple pages. How is a single image even suitable for this purpose?)

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