Today we're launching the footpath.ai Web Uploader, and with it, opening our map to everyone. If you can walk and you have a camera, any 360° camera or just the phone in your pocket, you can now map your neighbourhood's footpaths and see it published on the footpath.ai map.

Start here: uploader.footpath.ai

A mapper walking a tree-lined footpath with a helmet-mounted 360° camera, with a GPS track overlay

Why a Web Uploader?

For three years, most of our imagery has been captured by our own team and project partners. That works for commissioned projects, but the pedestrian world is enormous, and the people who know a neighbourhood best are the ones who walk it every day.

The Web Uploader removes every barrier we could find between "I want to map my street" and imagery live on the map:

  • No app to install. It runs entirely in your browser, on any device, anywhere in the world.
  • Any camera works. A 360° camera gives the richest captures, but a phone shooting interval photos is genuinely useful, most of the sidewalk attributes our AI extracts don't need a full panorama.
  • Privacy is automatic. Faces and licence plates are blurred before anything is published.
  • Positioning is handled. Upload a GPS track (GPX) alongside your photos and we match every image to it by timestamp, far more reliable than phone EXIF alone.

How it works

Plan a walk, a street, a park path, a school route, anywhere pedestrians go. Capture interval photos (not video) every 3 seconds or less as you walk, with a GPS tracker app running. Then drop your photos and GPX track into the Web Uploader; blurring, positioning and quality checks happen automatically. Once verified, your imagery appears on the footpath.ai map browser for everyone.

Capturing footpath imagery with a phone

Why it matters

Detailed, current footpath data simply doesn't exist for most of the world. Local governments don't know where their kerb ramps are; wheelchair users can't tell whether a route is passable; planners work from imagery shot through a car windscreen years ago. Every walk uploaded closes a little of that gap, and because contributed imagery is open, it benefits researchers, OpenStreetMap, and anyone building for pedestrians.

Your neighbourhood has never been mapped the way you see it, on foot, at walking pace, from the footpath itself. Now it can be.

Open the Web Uploader or read the capture guide for mappers to get set up.