Id: Bing Streetside images are blurrier than on Bing Maps

[1ec5]

Even with the high-resolution option enabled, Bing Streetside images appear lower in resolution in iD than on the Bing Maps website. For example, this VFW sign is easily legible from the street on Bing Maps without zooming all the way in. By contrast, in iD with the panel enlarged to obscure the entire editor canvas and zoomed in all the way, the word “Morrow” is barely legible, let alone the date and post number.

Reproduces in Firefox and Safari on macOS.

[1ec5]

At this location, iD maxes out at the quadkey 02132111031223221012, while Bing Maps maxes out at 021321110312232210122. The API actually seems to support going even a level deeper to 0213211103122322101222. Here are the images at those three quadkeys:

The missing levels of detail make it difficult to use the built-in Streetside panel to map things like conditional turn restrictions and business phone numbers.

/ref #5102

[quincylvania]

So iD already has the capacity to load the highest resolution quadkeys.

https://github.com/openstreetmap/iD/blob/fc18c7ae56d8ed69f2cc93e148dcc609f99096a4/modules/services/streetside.js#L372-L427

The issue is the time/data needed to download them. Currently iD loads streetside at 512px and switches to 1024px when you select "High Resolution". I tried bumping the top res to 4096px and it looked amazing but took awhile to load in.

A resolution picker isn't that elegant but may be worth considering.

[bhousel]

Ah yeah, it's kind of slow to use full resolution because it tries to load all of them, instead of just the few that the user is actually looking at. A cleverer solution would be to load the low res and then fetch only the high res tiles in view.

[1ec5]

Does Pannellum have any hooks for dynamically loading the higher-resolution tiles as the user zooms in, as Bing Maps does?

[tuxayo]

it's kind of slow to use full resolution because it tries to load all of them

That explains why each highres image freezes my whole browser for more than 15 seconds.

Plus the network loading, which means something like 20 seconds for each image jump.

Thanks for providing the highres option though. That makes Bing Streetside much more useful.