Panoramax

#Panoramax is an open and #federated alternative to #StreetView, born from collaboration between France’s national mapping agency #IGN and the French #OpenStreetMap community. With over 100 million geolocated images and a foundation in the making, the project aims to grow beyond its French origins.
Author

Ralph Straumann

Published

May 2, 2026

I learned a bit obliquely about Panoramax from this interview with Christian Quest on the OpenCage Blog. Panoramax is a project to create a collection of freely accessible and reusable photographs of places visible from public space.1 Currently, the project hosts over 100 million geolocated pictures, contributed by over 2,000 participants and covering over 900,000 km of road.

Panoramax started in 2022 in France. Remarkably (to me), as a collaboration between the French national mapping agency and the French OSM commmunity as Christian explains in the interview:

Panoramax is a project that started in 2022. OpenStreetMap France proposed to IGN2 to work together to build an open source, collaborative, decentralized and federated way of sharing ground level imagery.

Example uses cases for Panoramax data. Some of the Panoramax material (like this) still betrays its French origins, but virtually all Panoramax website content is in English now. (source: Panoramax)

Now, the initiative seeks to form the Panoramax Foundation (scheduled for this August), which will be a non-profit organization to support the project and also its growth outside of France. Christian:

The OSM foundation is a source of inspiration, mainly on its light approach. OSMF takes care of the very core things (the main database, some basic services on top of it, and tools for the contributors), letting an ecosystem and local chapters build on that core to provide many additional services around OSM data.

I think the Panoramax foundation should also take care of the core of the project, like the meta-catalog that is federating the autonomous local Panoramax instances and some shared tools for contributors or to help set up new Panoramax instances. Another thing the Panoramax foundation should take care [of] is the coordination of the actual software stack development. This does not mean the foundation will do all developments, but it should make sure they fit a shared goal for the emerging Panoramax ecosystem.

Panoramax coverage in Switzerland

The Panoramax website has an FAQ (that also addresses legal questions), contributor’s guide, tutorial and technical documentation, example use cases, and, of course, the access to the data itself.

Interesting origin story, with the open and governmental cooperation. And open data is always valuable and also in the interest of digital sovereignty. I’d like to see the project to (continue to) grow beyond France.

Footnotes

  1. Think of something like Mapillary or Google Street View, but with strong emphasis on open data and reuse.↩︎

  2. France’s National Mapping Agency, the Institut national de l’information géographique et forestière.↩︎