OpenStreetMap/Panoramax

Panoramax è un software FOSS federato per la raccolta di immagini libere a livello stradale. Si pone come alternativa libera a soluzioni completamente proprietarie come Google Street View o Bing Streetside e a soluzioni collaborative per immagini libere ma basate su software proprietario come Mapillary e KartaView. Rispetto a questi, Panoramax ha vari vantaggi:

• Se le immagini raccolte sono in mano a una organizzazione privata e questa non fosse più in grado di usarle (es. causa fallimento) non ha nessun interesse che queste vengano usate e i dati rischiano di andare persi. In caso un servizio Panoramax gestito dalla comunità venga terminato c'è tutto l'interesse per salvare i dati: questo è un incentivo per i contributori.
• Alcuni volontari sono restii a affidare le proprie immagini alle grandi multinazionali che gestiscono gli attuali servizi. Per essi l'uso di un servizio Panoramax è un incentivo.
• La struttura federata di Panoramax previene un Single Point Of Failure
• Uso di uno stack completamente open source

Istanze

Le istanze esistenti e la loro area geografica di riferimento sono documentate su osm:Panoramax#Services.

Attualmente (novembre 2025) i volontari italiani usano l'istanza francese ma sarebbe corretto creare un'istanza italiana in base a quanto scritto qui:

In the short term, OSM FR can host pictures from the outside of France, but worldwide coverage is not sustainable in the long term, due to storage limits (and costs). Therefore, it is preferred that other local communities set up their own federated instances

Costi di gestione e altri aspetti da valutare

Deploying a Panoramax instance: the pre-flight check list su Geocommuns

Indicazioni di Christian Quest, il manutentore di Panoramax

Legal

 Each country can have its specific law regarding privacy, data protection, photography in public spaces, etc.
 Before starting the project in France, we did a legal study job to be sure we were not putting ourselves in danger and to know what can and can’t be done.
 For example:
 - taking pictures in the public space is ok,
 - making them public can only be done after bluring faces and license plates,
 - people or intellectual property rights owner on building or artworks present in the public space are not an issue as long as the subject of the picture is no the person or the artwork itself

In Italia sappiamo che non abbiamo la libertà di panorama, quali vincoli vigono sulle immagini a livello stradale?

Privacy / blurring

 We trained our own model to detect faces and license plates. As any computer vision model (yes, AI), it is not 100% accurate and can have false negatives. The feedback we had so far is very good but do not expect no false negative (and positives too).
 We implemented a reporting link in the viewer which now automatically hides the reported picture, and now anybody can report and hide a picture within a few clicks.
 If your country has stricter privacy rules, training a dedicated model is something possible of other kind of things need to be blurred.

Forbidden areas

 We also recently implemented “forbidden areas” which allow to define on an instance areas were pictures will be trashed at upload time. In France we have an official list of such areas (some military zones, prisons, nuclear plants, etc).
 The same mecanism can be used to accepts pictures only in a given area, for exemple IGN instance will limit its coverage only of the french territory.

In Italia esistono aree di questo tipo?

License on pictures and derivates

 The license under which the pictures can be reused for mapping must be carefully chosen.
 Public sector in France uses a license similar to CC-BY (called Licence Ouverte), so this is ok for mapping for anyone including OSM.
 OSM-FR community prefers share-alike licenses, so we opted for a “light” CC-BY-SA which need to be explained.
 CC-BY-SA makes mandatory that any derivate being under CC-BY-SA too and this is not compatible with OSM’s ODbL license. So we voted to grant an additionnal right to reuse the pictures to produce non photographic derivates under Licence Ouvert (like CC-BY) or ODbL.
 Remember that Mapillary is also publishing pictures under CC-BY-SA but also grants an additional right to use them to contribute to OpenStreetMap. We extended that principle to allow also the public sector to generate data that is even “more” open than OSM’s ODbL.
 One side effect of the above is that one cannot take pictures from Mapillary and put them in Panoramax without the picture author approval and that’s why peopple who offered to takeout picture and republish them on Panoramax ask for this approval.
 We recommend local OSM community to adopt the same “light” CC-BY-SA or a CC-BY.
 Panoramax meta-catalog currently only contain pictures available under these license and we plan to keep it like that so that mapping reusers are safe and do not have to check each picture license.

In Italia la licenza principale usata dagli enti pubblici è definita dal Open By Default ed è CC-BY-4. Dobbiamo valutare la licenza da usare.

Financial investment

 Panoramax is mostly a storage challenge.
 That’s why we opted for decentralization and instances, but it remains a challenge for each instance.
 For example, a rough estimation for a unique dense coverage of France gives something like 100M pictures. With redundancy and a backup we easily reach 1PB of storage.
 In most cases, cloud base hosting is very expensive especially on storage and not an option to consider in the long term (except it if is offered… in the long term too !).
 OSM-FR choice has been to self-host our own server and storage bay in an sponsored colocation halk-rack we have near Paris. All hardware except the SSDs is donated or second-life (ebay), including the HDDs. That allowed to lower the cost.
 The server is a Dell R7910, with 2 GTX 1070 (for the blurring API), 256GB of RAM, 2 4TB NVMe SSDs, and mostly 8TB HDDs (around 40000h old). Total cost: 3500€.
 We compensate the risk of old disks failure by using ZFS soft-raid redundancy.
 The last disk we bought where less than 10€/TB.
 To give an idea of the storage need, we currently have 20M pictures with around 100TB of storage used.
 Distributing the storage is something to consider, one way to do it and to investigate/test is using Garage which is a distributed S3 storage. The drawback it that more storage is needed to guarantee redundancy.
 GPU are not mandatory to start (see below).

Human investment

 Setting up a server and administering it takes some time and means someone has to do it.
 Upgrading the software stack takes some time especially when the code base is moving fast.
 A few hours a week is what you should dedicate to maintain an instance (see below).
 We can help for the setup, do not hesitate to ask !
 Administering a Panoramax instance means administering at least :
 - the storage space
 - the Panoramax backend API (python based)
 - the underlying postgresql database
 - the Panoramax frontend with the viewer (js)
 The blurring API is an additional part you can deploy or you can start by using the one setup by OSM-FR (we have 2 servers, with a total of 4 GPU and they are far from being overloaded).

Per il setup si può valutare se qualche volontario è disposto a occuparsene. A prescindere DOBBIAMO mantenere allineato il consulente pagato che segue la sistemistica generale di Wikimedia Italia perchè si occupi della manutenzione in modo che il progetto sia altamente disponibile indipendentemente dalla disponibilità dei volontari.

OSM FR numbers

 A few numbers from the OSM-FR instance as of mid-december 2024:
 - 22.7M pictures
 - 48.5 TB storage for originals (2.2TB / 1M pictures)
 - 22.5 TB for the derivates (1 TB/ 1M picture)
 - 157 GB for the postgresql DB (7GB/1M pictures, 114GB once compressed by ZFS)

A Panoramax UK instance? su OSM Community - commento 9

OSM-FR uses around 100TB EXCLUDING backups

When I proposed the project on the OSM-FR forum, I did a calculation to have an idea for one dense coverage all over France. With redundancy and backup, the total was around 1 PB.
Storage is really the #1 issue and that’s why we chose to have a decentralized sharing. We chose to self-host our instance to control the costs and we use mostly second life hardware, the only exception are SSDs.
Most of our HDD are 8TB now (we started with 3TB ones), and we can get very good deals on this capacity (around or even less than 10€/TB). They are not new, so we have redundancy (2 disks in each set of 6 disks, all managed using ZFS).
Our hardware investment for the server is around 3500€ so far. Server hosting (colocation) is offered by a Paris area datacenter.
Do not hesitate if you have question, need for advices or help to setup an instance.
The core dev team is working only in english in the gitlab repo and documentations are all available in english.
Do not hesitate to show up on the geocommons forum, english posts are ok even if most of past post are in french.

Link a geocommons forum

A Panoramax UK instance? su OSM Community - commento 15

Wales’s instance only just went live. User murein on the osm discord is the owner, i dont know if he active on here. I’ve been talking to him regularly about it recently as i’m currently dumping my entire archive of 360 footage on to it. He is currently self funding it and his response when i previously asked about the cost was:

> a server cost of about €4-5 per month, S3 storage varies by size (currently €0) about €5.5 (6usd) for 0.5TB of photo storage. The domain was €5-10 per year I think.

We are quickly discovering that 8k(27MP) 360 images every minimum ~4m adds up very quickly so this biggest cost will always be the S3 storage, the size of which would very much be dependant of the popularity of the instance. Atm, I believe i’m the only one contributing Wales other than murein themself but i’m also contributing far more images than the average user would and the instance is still young.

Christian Quest risponde:

That’s why OSM-FR have its storage on premise, instead of costly S3.
We BUY 1TB around 10€ (used drives) which is roughtly the monthly RENT of 1TB on S3.
Even with redundancy and backups this is way cheaper… but yes, you need to take care of your storage yourself (currently 400TB in the server excluding backup).

Possibili strade da esplorare

• Concordare con OSM France un supporto finanziario in cambio dell'estensione della copertura ufficiale dell'istanza francese anche al territorio italiano
• Istanza congiunta realizzzata in collaborazione con altri capitoli nazionali. Potenziali partner (da questa lista)
  • OpenStreetMap Austria
  • Swiss OpenStreetMap Association e Wikimedia CH
  • OpenStreetMap Deutschland / FOSSGIS e.V.
• Istanza italiana => Ingente investimento sia iniziale che sul lungo termine per la manutenzione, cerchiamo di evitarlo

Link utili

• osm:Panoramax
• panoramax.fr: Sito ufficiale
• panoramax.openstreetmap.fr: Catalogo per esplorare tutte le immagini di tutte le istanze

Soci interessati

Se sei interessato a collaborare attivamente nell'avvio di una istanza che copra l'Italia, anche solo come tester, segnati qui sotto (con ~~~)

• Danysan1 (discussioni)