enrichers: street-level imagery, since listing photos are not free

[ralyodio]

You asked whether rental property images can come from anywhere. No for the interior, yes for the outside — this is the yes.

Why there's no free interior photo

Listing photography is locked up harder than listing data, for a different reason: a photograph carries its own copyright, owned by whoever took it, quite separately from any licence on the listing. There's no free source and there isn't going to be one.

Mapillary is the way round it for the street: crowdsourced imagery in 190+ countries, CC BY-SA 4.0, free with a token anybody can get. It won't show the kitchen. It shows the street, the block and what's opposite — which for somewhere a person is deciding whether to live is often the more useful picture, and is the part a listing's own photographs are least likely to show honestly.

Attribution isn't optional

CC BY-SA is share-alike, so every result stores the photographer's username, the image id, the licence and its URL — and the block says in as many words that the credit must be shown with the picture. Storing the URL without the credit would make this the same problem it exists to avoid.

It works for anything with a point

Coordinates are read in exactly the order the database's own ndb_geo_shape() uses — data.location, place, position, geometry, then the bare object. So an item this can place is precisely an item the geographic queries can already find, and it applies to crime reports and building permits as readily as to property.

• (0, 0) is refused — it's in the Atlantic and means a missing coordinate
• GeoJSON is handled as [lon, lat], the order people get wrong
• bbox is 0.0012° either side (~130 m). Mapillary formalised a 0.01° ceiling in January 2026; this stays well inside it, and an image 400 m away isn't a picture of this address anyway

Probing the live endpoint caught a real bug before it shipped

Mapillary answers an invalid token with HTTP 500, not 401:

500 {"error":{"message":"Invalid OAuth 2.0 Access Token","code":190}}

My first version checked the status and would have reported "mapillary answered 500" — sending someone to Mapillary's status page instead of to their token. The body is now read first and code 190 is named as what it is, with a test for each of three cases: bad token as 500, bad token as 401, and a genuine outage that must not be called a bad token.

Also

openlisting now carries lat/lon onto data.location under the key names ndb_geo_shape reads, so a seller publishing coordinates gets street imagery with no further plumbing.

MAPILLARY_TOKEN is unset, so the enricher is simply off until one exists. Default-on for listings and housing.

Checks

32 new tests, 2,133 across the suite, lint clean. The usual 5 Redis/Postgres integration failures this dev box can't run.

🤖 Generated with Claude Code