From day one of Mapillary, we have been committed to building a global street-level imagery platform that allows everyone to get the imagery and data they need to make better maps. With tens of thousands of contributors to our platform and with maps being improved with Mapillary data every single day, we’re now taking the next big step on that journey.

Today, we’re excited to share that Mapillary has joined Facebook to be part of their open mapping efforts. As some of you know, Facebook is building tools and technology to improve maps through a combination of machine learning, satellite imagery and partnerships with mapping communities, as part of their mission to bring the world closer together. These maps power products like Facebook Marketplace that drive transactions for millions of small businesses, and supply vital data to humanitarian organizations around the world.

At Mapillary, we’re building the tools for creating a living and visual representation of every place in the world, made available for anyone to update the maps they care about. By merging our efforts, we will further improve the ways that people and machines can work with both aerial and street-level imagery to produce map data. Lots of exciting results will come out of this, including the data we all need to make better maps.

Mapillary map coverage as of June 2020

What happens to Mapillary

Our plan is to continue being a global platform for imagery, map data, and improving all maps. You will still be able to upload imagery and use the map data from all the images on the platform.

Our OpenStreetMap commitment

Our commitment to OpenStreetMap stays. The plan is for the rights given to OpenStreetMap editors to remain unchanged and for our work with OpenStreetMap communities and companies to continue on the same path as always. Mapillary will continue to spearhead a collaborative model where all map communities, companies, cities, and others work together to keep the maps of our world accurate, detailed, and up to date.

What happens to customers and commercial uses

Historically, all of the imagery available on our platform has been open and free for anyone to use for non-commercial purposes. Moving forward, that will continue to be true, except that starting today, it will also be free to use for commercial users as well. By continuing to make all images uploaded to Mapillary open, public, and available to everyone, we hope to enable new use cases, and grow the breadth of coverage and usage to benefit mapping for everyone. While we previously needed to focus on commercialisation to build and run the platform, joining Facebook moves Mapillary closer to the vision we've had from day one of offering a free service to anyone.

The road ahead

Although much has happened since we first launched Mapillary, we’re still just at the beginning. So much of the world still needs to be mapped, and so many of the world’s maps still require updates. As the world changes, our maps need to change with it. Together with Facebook, we’ll be able to build the tools that will keep our maps detailed, accurate, and up to date - for everyone, everywhere.

Thank you for being a big part of the journey so far. We’re very excited about the future and can’t wait to build it with you.

The Mapillary team

/Jan Erik, CEO and co-founder