Given these as the only active instances, there seems to be a lacking of a universally editable Panoramax instance. I’m curious if OSM has a plan to deploy one, and, if not, why.
I would personally love to contribute street level imagery, but there doesn’t seem to be a worthy service at the moment. I don’t want to spend a bunch of time capturing street-level imagery only for that effort to disappear if a given service goes under, or begins doing questionable things (eg Mapillary). Panoramax seems to have a lot of future potential, but there doesn’t seem to be much active at the moment.
Hello, I’m one of the devs of the Panoramax team, just a little precision :
panoramax.xyz is the “meta-catalog”, the central index of all publicly available pictures. It’s read-only as it’s just a facility for users and developers to access the whole federated content at once.
panoramax.openstreetmap.fr is mainly for France, but allows any OSM community in the world to upload pictures for testing purposes. You can upload a few thousands pictures and see if the toolchain is appropriate for your needs. Once you know, we encourage local community to setup their own server.
panoramax.ign.fr is targeted mostly at public authorities in France, although there is no registration limitation for now.
+3 millions new pictures each month, reaching 56 millions as now
+900 different contributors since we started
And we’d like to see new instances growing all around the world Discussions with some OSM local communities had taken place, but having a worldwide OSM fallback instance (for smaller countries / local communities, without needed ressources for setting up such service) would be a great benefit for sure.
We have today (28 April) at 5:00PM (Paris time) our international monthly meeting here (in English), if some of you are curious and have questions about Panoramax or setting up an instance : Jitsi Meet
One new instance we’ll add to the federation soon is from a company in Belgium but will share only their own pictures, it won’t be open to public uploads.
This is fine too, more pictures available to everyone.
With global platforms being so commons nowadays, it is hard to think again with the original decentralized approach of Internet, with many different size of servers/instance with ones that are open to public uploads and others read-only.
It’s better to see Panoramax more as a free/libre software that allows to setup your server small or large, open to public uploads to anybody or a limited list of contributors or even a single one, but federated (or not like a full private instance).
When setting up an instance you can choose at the API level a limited geographic area, and who can upload which allows to adapt to your capacity in term of storage as storage is really the main challenge. Forget S3 like storage in someone else cloud, unless you have too much money
I want to echo the desire for a US-based panoramax instance.
Kartaview seems to be inactive (my uploads are never processed), and Mapillary has the baggage of being owned by Facebook/Meta.
I’ve seriously considered trying to host my own instance, but I think the storage requirements are a bit out of my reach currently, even if I tried to limit the instance to my state. I’d love to contribute funds to an instance managed by a local group though.
Our stats : 
Discussions with some OSM local communities had taken place, but having a worldwide OSM fallback instance (for smaller countries / local communities, without needed ressources for setting up such service) would be a great benefit for sure.