Street-level imagery
Street-level imagery lets you drop down to the ground and look around. A coverage layer paints the streets where photos exist, and clicking a covered spot opens an immersive, pannable viewer — the open-data equivalent of dragging a little figure onto the map to see what a place actually looks like.
The default provider is Panoramax, an open, federated street-level imagery network run by IGN and OpenStreetMap France. It needs no credentials, so the feature works out of the box. OpenMapX never hosts the photos itself; it reads coverage and imagery from the configured provider on demand, proxied through its own API.
Several providers can be enabled at once. Their coverage renders together on one layer, colour-coded per provider, and the viewer moves between them seamlessly.
What you get
- A coverage overlay — a "street-level imagery" layer you toggle from the layer selector. It draws photo sequences as lines and individual photos as dots, with a separate marker style for 360° panoramas, so you can see at a glance where imagery is available. Each enabled provider gets its own colour.
- An immersive viewer — click any covered point and a full-screen viewer opens over the map. You can pan and look around, follow the clickable arrows to move down the street, and read the reverse-geocoded address, capture date and licence of the current photo.
- Photos on place panels — companion integrations surface nearby street-level photos directly in a place's detail panel, alongside the rest of the place information. This is independent of the coverage overlay and can be enabled on its own.
Providers
| Provider | Default | Credentials | Notes |
|---|---|---|---|
| Panoramax | Enabled | None | Open STAC API. Self-hostable. Imagery under CC BY-SA 4.0 or Etalab 2.0. |
| Mapillary | Disabled | Access token | Opt-in. Review its Terms before enabling — see below. |
Every enabled provider is active. Enabling one in the admin panel is all it takes — its coverage joins the layer in its own colour.
To pin the set and its priority order explicitly, set:
# infra/docker/.env
INTEGRATION_STREET_LEVEL_IMAGERY_PROVIDER=panoramax,mapillary
When this is set, a provider that is enabled but not listed stays inactive.
Mapillary's imagery is openly licensed (CC BY-SA 4.0), but its platform Terms prohibit use "in connection with real-time navigation or route guidance" and require applications to materially supplement Mapillary rather than replicate it. OpenMapX is a navigation product, so Mapillary ships disabled by default. Review those terms against your own deployment before enabling it. Mapillary is also API-only — there is no self-hostable fallback.
Enabling Mapillary
Enable the integration in the admin panel and give it an access token, or set it from the environment (an environment value always wins over the admin-panel value):
# infra/docker/.env
INTEGRATION_STREET_LEVEL_IMAGERY_MAPILLARY_ACCESSTOKEN=MLY|<app_id>|<token>
INTEGRATION_PHOTOS_MAPILLARY_ACCESSTOKEN=MLY|<app_id>|<token>
With no token configured, the integration's backend routes return a "not configured" response and its coverage stays empty — nothing breaks, it is simply inactive.
The token stays server-side. Imagery is proxied through the OpenMapX API, so no provider token is bundled into the browser JavaScript.
Pointing Panoramax at your own instance
Panoramax is federated, and its server software is open source. To avoid
depending on a public instance, run your own and set the integration's
instanceUrl in the admin panel:
https://your-panoramax-instance.example/api
Any STAC-compatible Panoramax instance works. The licence of the imagery you get depends on the instance you point at.
How it works
Every provider is an integration implementing a shared StreetLevelProvider
contract and exposing the same routes under
/api/integrations/street-level-imagery-<provider>/:
| Route | Purpose |
|---|---|
/capabilities | Coverage tile descriptor, colour, licence, privacy |
/tiles/{z}/{x}/{y} | Coverage vector tiles, proxied |
/nearest | Nearest image to a coordinate |
/images/:id | One image's metadata and assets |
/images/:id/links | Navigable neighbours for the viewer's arrows |
The web app talks only to these routes, so it never needs to know which provider is behind them.
Images are addressed by a provider-qualified reference — panoramax:<id> — which
is also what deep links carry (?sv=panoramax:<id>). Because the viewer's
internal node ids use the same form, an arrow can lead from one provider's
imagery straight into another's.
Navigation arrows
The viewer places up to six arrows, one per compass sector, computed the same way for every provider: sequence continuations win over neighbouring sequences, and between two neighbours the more recent capture wins, falling back to the nearer one on the same day. Providers that expose no cross-sequence neighbours simply yield fewer arrows — the interaction is identical.
Privacy
Coverage tiles and image metadata are proxied through the OpenMapX API. The imagery itself is loaded directly from the provider, so the first time you open the viewer for a given provider you are asked to confirm. Until you do, no request reaches that provider — including via an arrow that would cross into it. Each provider is confirmed separately.
Attribution for every visible provider is shown on the map, as their licences require.