Photos en route

Work has begun on restoring one of the most popular features of the original Camcycle version of the CycleStreets Journey Planner.

Photos-en-route (PER) selected images from the photo library that corresponded to the direction of travel of the planned cycle journey. The images were displayed in among the route list, but also as a slide-show, which simultaneously showed one of the photos and moved a marker on the map to give an idea of where the photo was taken.

There are well over 10,000 images of Cambridge in the photo library, and so the result was a fairly comprehensive storyboard of the journey. See this Cambridge route for instance.

When it came to making CycleStreets available to a national audience we found we needed to re-write the code to support PER. We’ve now reached the point where the photos on the planned route can be quickly determined. The next step is to decide how to display them on the web pages. As a starter they are simply being including in among the route listing as thumbnails, and for now there’s no way to turn this feature off. We’re thinking about re-introducing the old slideshow, but the question is where to put it on the page! If you have any suggestions do let us know.

We hope the re-emergence of this feature will encourage more of you to contribute images of the cycling network to the Photomap. The PER algorithm prefers photos from the library that match the direction of travel along the route – so don’t forget to set the ‘bearing’ correctly when adding your photos. Where there is a choice, this allows the PER storyboard to show different photos for the return route.