Mapillary

Mapillary is a nice open-source / crowd-source alternative to Google Street View. Get yourself the app and start contributing your own views of the world. Of course, you could stay inside Google and just use their Photo Sphere app.

Joe Kerski shares some idea on how to use Mapillary in Citizen science street level imagery and mapping with Mapillary and here's a nice tutorial on how to embed Mapillary in Esri Story Maps: Taking the Tour: Mapillary in Esri Story Maps.

I played around with the Mapillary app and collected a couple of sequence:

• Sachem Head
• Highland Pond

Not surprising this seems to work much better on flat and easy ground such as roads or dirt roads as opposed to the rocky ridge line of Sachem Head. Maybe a gimbal would work. The sequence export via geojson is pretty lame as you only get the location of the points, but not the associated photographs. Best to view your sequence inside Mapillary.

Is this useful? Sure! You can quickly and easily collect photographs of your research area and share them in a cool way with the rest of the world. If that's something that you want to do. It's also easy to compile sequences into an Esri Story map. It also makes for a fun activity with students - as long as they have a smartphone (and can download the app, create a Mapillary account, and there's Wifi available to upload the photographs).