Mapally

Mapally is commonly a misspelling of Mapillary, a platform for crowdsourced street-level imagery and mapping data. Mapillary allows users to capture, upload, and share geotagged photos that collectively form large-scale street-level image datasets. These datasets are used to improve map data, support navigation, urban planning, and research, and can be browsed or integrated into mapping tools via APIs. Data from Mapillary has been used with OpenStreetMap, various GIS applications, and computer vision analyses.

History and development: Mapillary was founded in 2013 by Swedish software engineer Jan Erik Solem. The project grew as a community-driven effort to collect street-level imagery, offering mobile apps and desktop tools that enable photo capture, processing, and automatic alignment and labeling of imagery. The service established a large, globally distributed archive of geotagged images used for mapping and analysis.

Acquisition and status: In 2020, Meta Platforms (formerly Facebook) announced the acquisition of Mapillary for around $100 million to bolster its mapping capabilities. Since the acquisition, Mapillary has continued to operate as a product under Meta, with ongoing development of imagery collection, processing, and API access for developers and researchers.

Usage and licensing: Content on Mapillary is user-contributed and governed by the platform’s terms of service. Users retain rights to their uploaded imagery under applicable licenses, while Mapillary provides access to the data for mapping, research, and other uses, typically with attribution where required by license.