Hi all,
I’m new to OSM and HOT and wanted to get your advice. I’ve noticed group mapping projects tend to have people using different background images, which tend to be slightly off center from each other. Occasionally, I’ll go to map an area for HOT and find someone has already worked on it and everything seems off. Is there a preferred image to use (bing, esri, etc.)?
It is logical if the project HOT manager makes a choice for the best result for his project and tell all the members to do so as well, stick to one view. Use other views as reserve due to clouds carefully and return to the basic choice.
I’d suggest “whichever one is obviously best” or “all of them”.
Imagery sources have different ages, different accuracy, different levels of cloud cover, and importantly different offsets from what is “correct”. Depending where you are in the world you may be able to use “known good” alignments (perhaps government sources, perhaps other) or GPS traces to be able to align each piece of background imagery in the editor.
Don’t just stick with one source of imagery and align everything to that - work out what you believe is the correct alignment by looking at as many sources as you can, nudge the different imagery sources to match that, and then ask which imagery is newest / most detailed / best for other reasons.
Edit following the answer above: Explicitly DO NOT stick to one view. Encourage all participants to map things as well as they can, even if this means fewer things mapped in total.