I think it’s reasonable that anyone uploading hundreds of thousands of streetlevel images they’ve captured can be safely assumed to know that they take up a lot of space, given that they would probably be at minimum moving images around between the capture device, removable storage, and/or their computer, each of which clearly has limited capacity…
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Which exactly proves the point from that obXKCD #2501 I mentioned 
People have been conditioned that those things “just work”[1]. Average people:
- don’t know how (or why) they work,
- they have no idea that a single picture takes more space than a full book they couldn’t read in a month[2] (much less how much space it takes in “bytes” – or what those “bytes” even are – “are those the same as megapixels?”),
- they don’t count the pictures, they just record for hour (or few) and then press upload when they get home[3],
- what those MB, GB, TB and other acronyms even mean,
- that 128MB is different from 128GB (or 128TB) - “it was 128 of one or the other”,
- what is the difference between local device and the cloud,
- what is the difference between RAM and hard disk (I kid you not),
- why “GB” on one is immensely different from “GB” on another,
- why are you talking about “cost” when you could just store the pictures in that “cloud” thing that stores all their stuff is completely free of charge.
- "Have you been living under a rock for the last decade? You could store whole Library of Alexandria in storage chip smaller then your thumbnail and still have plenty of free space left for God’s sake! Nobody pays for that nowadays, we’re not in 1980s anymore!
- how the cloud economy works, and why “free of charge” just isn’t – but it actually means that you’re the product being sold,
- etc.
-
Average people takes pictures with their phones and they are just always available (they don’t even whether locall or on the cloud – is there a difference?) – And when that for some reason doesn’t work automagically (i.e. because they don’t have the Internet), they absolutely panic (and call me or other unfortunates going by the title “that computer person” [4]). They don’t do any of the stuff you mention.
-
The more advanced folk, who have been previously uploading to (say) the Mapillary, also have no idea about storage costs and stuff. You’d more likely get:
- “I just take the pictures from my car dashcam and upload them, what do you mean by limited storage? I can upload infinitely many and my mobile phone still works just fine and not complain about not enough space. In fact, I’ve been doing that for years with this ancient iPhone5”, or even
- “What do you mean pay? If anything, they should be paying me for taking the effort to collect all those photos! Friend of my boyfriend drives Google Car and records images for Google StreetView, and they pay him 5 figures!”
-
Even many of the borderline expert folk, who have bough the microSD card for their phone (back in the days when those things still existed) and installed it themselves, will likely have trouble comprehending the issue: “What are you talking about? Like, I’ve bought that 8GB microSD card for one time cost of $9.99 and after years I’ve still not filled it even halfway. And today you can get 10 times as much space for some money; why are you making such a drama over peanuts?”
Dude, even I myself wasn’t using “(at minimum) capture device requiring transferring images to computer so I can upload them to Panoramax” before I installed our Panoramax instance, and even now that I have borrowed one, I don’t think about user-side storage issues (nor do I even know what is the camera’s capacity[5] - I just know it is way more than I need[6], and just upload and remove directly from USB storage connected camera[7])
No need to worry about that. Move along. ↩︎
even assuming they still could or would want to read a book ↩︎
and even if they did count them, it would mean nothing to them whether it is 500 or 50k pictures ↩︎
doesn’t make one iota of the difference whether you’re Linux sysadmin, PHP dev or Oracle SQL DBA; surely you can easily do data recovery from their encrypted device for which they’ve forgot the password ↩︎
I know I could easily find out, but I just don’t care, as it is irrelevant for my use case ↩︎
I go over 3 batteries and 10000mAh battery bank before using like 10% of the storage - it is something something thousands of FullHD pictures I think? or something like that ↩︎
and that removing mostly so I don’t have to think what I already uploaded and what not, and not because of storage space shortage ↩︎
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Hello, you shouldn’t delete pictures, that represent people effort to document reality, not necessarily conscious that Panoramax accepted them for testing purposes. In any case please promote and allow migration (but announcing widely, not only on forum people won’t be aware of). Collaborators are not necessarily scanned users able to manage this issue. Also consider that other regions communities are not as mature as Europe’s ones (meaning: technical knowledge, auto organization, resource availability, technologies).
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One month later…
- We have a few more Panoramax new instances deployed (for example one in Argentina)
- OSM France has started crowdfunding to extend storage on its server (more than 4000€ so far)
- Work is in progress about simplifiying moving pictures between two instances
- Picture deletion is not planned on OSM FR instance (I mentionned that as a possibility)
Not yet done:
- setup a real test instance, with limited capacity and automatic picture deletion after some time
- limit uploads on OSM France instance to french terrirories
We’re also working on creating a Panoramax Foundation, to have a more global approchach for the whole projet which is current very active in France where it started. This foundation will be a non-for-profit structure whose role is to coordinate the project and take care of the federation of instance (like managing the meta-catalog).
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I worked in tech support for >5 years and have always been “that computer person” - I know all too well that you are absolutely correct about all your comments about average people![1] My post was scoped not to average people but to:
But, overall I agree with you 
Personally, I think in some ways that’s a good thing, actually. Specialization means we can all move forward as a whole faster! ↩︎
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Where can I see a list of every new instance and what would be the command in the terminal to use for each one?
AFAIK each instance has rules as to what’s allowed. So maybe read those first?
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I’d suggest looking at https://wiki.openstreetmap.org/wiki/Panoramax#Instances - especially links in this paragraph:
Up-to-date list of currently federated instances can be found in JSON format at https://api.panoramax.xyz/api/instances (or unofficial but more human-readable format here) - the list below in the wiki table is manually updated list which may be out of date.
(as the wiki list below is manually curated and thus often - if not always - outdated)
see https://docs.panoramax.fr/cli/USAGE/ . Basically, you’d say something like:
% panoramax_cli upload --api-url https://panoramax.osm-hr.org ./example-dir-with-pics/
While changing https://panoramax.osm-hr.org to the URL of the instance you’ve chosen.
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Yes, reading that is a must before uploading, of course.
But also, if one has several TB of the pictures they intend to upload (as I think it was mentioned that @Hopen111 has?), it would be prudent to contact the instance admins first (at e-mail contact listed in https://api.panoramax.xyz/api/instances) and ask if uploading all of that would be fine with them (regardless of the fact that instance description might not be saying anything about amount of pictures).
Because many smaller instances might have just a few TB of space altogether, and they would be very sad to wake up one day and find out that overnight their whole instance was completely filled to the brim.
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https://panoramax.mapcomplete.org looks to be the best fit for me at the moment, but I will wait another month to see if a US specific instance with enough storage is made soon.
Note that this one is (as its description “Panoramax instances for all images uploaded via Mapcomplete” implies and wiki states more explicitly) only available by using https://mapcomplete.org/ webapp (for uploading images of single POIs) and does not allow “generic road” uploads via CLI (which seems to be what you want?)
More active approach then just waiting is usually more likely to give results. 
So you may want to see where US OSM community hangs out and try to see if there are others already working on one or interested on starting doing it, and offer what help you can (e.g. donations in money or hardware, or sysadmin work, or helping testing etc.)
Or you can try setting up your own Panoramax instance. I’ve written a step-by-step walkthrough how to do it in my OSM diary, and I’d be happy to lend assistance to anyone willing to try installing their own instance (and in fact already did few). So feel free to PM me should you choose to accept that mission! 
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Yep, as one of the folks who recently set up the Panoramax AR 
instance, I’d 100% subscribe to that being a more productive way than waiting and seeing 
And as one I’ve substantially benefited from @Matija_Nalis write-up of the installation instructions for the OSM HR instance, I’m equally happy to ‘pay it forward’ by lending assistance too 
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Hello all!
I am pleased to announce that my instance Panoramax-US-NW (API) is now available for use by those in the northwest of the US!
- I am using OpenStreetMap for authentication
- I am using the panoramax.fr instance for blurring (for now)
- Uploads are currently limited to the following states: WA, OR, ID, MT, WY
- I’ve set aside roughly 8TB for now (storage is pricey these days!)
- I am in the process of submitting for federation (Edit: Done!)
- I’d like to get added to Baba’s upload targets, but may need assistance making the pull request
I am holding off on re-uploading the bulk of my imagery (several TB) to see when the ability to migrate images between instances while preserving their IDs is implemented. If you have a lot of imagery on the FR instance, I recommend doing the same so we don’t break any existing links unecessarily.
Thank you @Matija_Nalis for your walkthrough- it was what got me over my hesitation. I may be doing a write up of my experience at some point.
Please feel free to take a look, upload imagery, and let me know if you see anything that needs updating.
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Note that in the meantime since my diary post, Baba issue #170 has been implemented, so next release of Baba should be able to fetch list of all instances automatically, without any extra work from instance admin side. Yay!
Note that there is small typo in your API summary: says the the URL is https:/.pano.locus.sbs (while it should be https://pano.locus.sbs).
Great to see you in the federation!
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Oh! The Baba update is great to hear. That’s a perfect solution!
Edit: And that feature is already live! Wonderful.
Regarding the typo- I am not sure where to fix that. My API_SUMMARY does not specify a URL, and I don’t see the malformed URL string anywhere in my configuration files. So I am not sure where it is coming from. If you can point me to what I need to update, please do!
I asked on my federation request, and it is being discussed.
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