|
I have tried many ground survey techniques--audio/GPS tracks/photo(sequence or single)/just brain memory, by walking/car/bicycle/motorcycle. Most of these I still keep either on Mapillary, Google Photos, or OSM traces. Brain data is surely not reliable. Audio (with GPS track) data could be preserved by converting it into waypoints, but it felt like unnecessary extra work. Now I am about to try GPS video mapping. I feel it is such a shame that I will have to delete the videos after 1 or 2 uses, and no proof that I did my survey the way I did it. Google Photos allows unlimited video storage but still, I won't have enough internet quota to upload them all. Is this the way most people do their ground surveys? Discard the 'notes' after processed and transferred to OSM? |
|
I used to keep all my survey data but after a while it consumed too much space on my laptop (I refuse to use "free" cloud services as I'd rather opt out of their marketing of information about me). Since everything I map is field verifiable I think that if someone has a question about what I did, they can check the map against their own survey. That said, it is usually a day or two between when I do the edits and when I delete the survey notes/gpx tracks/photos/video so if someone has a comment on my change set(s) (hasn't happened yet) then I could document for them where I got the information. If there is a road or trail that is different than shown on the (usually older) satellite imagery, I will upload my GPX tracks to OSM to document it. But I find the Strava heatmaps are more useful than OSM GPX tracks when actually mapping. Keeping the survey data forever doesn't make sense to me anyway other than for historical interest: The features change over time and old survey data may not reflect the current state of things anyway. So keeping the survey data for a few days or a week after the edits have been committed seems a reasonable compromise. Anyone who is monitoring your area for changes can make a comment or ask a question during that time frame. |
FWIW I store everything, but as I don't take videos storage space isn't an issue.
Update: After finally trying video mapping on my scooter the whole day yesterday, I think I am going back to mostly photo mapping. Because I am finding my 1080p videos lacking in resolution that texts are difficult to read unless they are big or very close.
Video mapping is quite OK and superior to photos for -some- applications (following route signs for example), for others not. It really depends.