via TomTom Map Share Reporter:
NEW Add a photo of the situation A geotagged photo helps us to process your report and update our map.
I work for a pretty cool company. We make maps for ourselves and a lot of very cool companies. When a customer tells us there’s a change in the map that we should take note of, that’s really valuable and customers can do it on smartphones, personal navigation devices and through our website. The thing is, when we receive a notice from a customer, the report has to be verified with a trusted source. We work with towns, cities, states, buy data and sometimes, we send out a car to survey the area (pictured below) so we make absolutely sure that the map edit we make is accurate.
Over the last 5 years, many of our customers have a smartphone with a camera along with A-GPS that captures a location on a map (Lat, Long). Mobile photos with geo-tagged EXIF data are a very easy way for a customer to snap a photo of the real-world map changes they are reporting and we can place that photo on a map using the EXIF data to be sure where they say there is a change, the photo proves that’s where they were when taking it.
We still have to verify map changes but geo-tagged images are a great second source verifying a reporter’s text based feedback. Great work to the Map Share Reporter team on adding this. I’ve been using it all day and it works incredibly well.
