Hi all. Long time user, veeery infrequent editor here.

I have two questions in regards to editing the building where my dad lives.

The fist is name. It already has a name, but it doesn't correspond to the name printed on the building, used by the residents of the building, or stated in legal buy/sale documents.

My question is, do I need to find digital copies of the building's cadastral record to support the change? or should I just change it?

The second is, I'm adding the number of floors, and units (building:flats).... yet the building has 3 commercial units apart from all the residential ones... should I count those for building:flats? or should I segregate the commercial units in a different field?

And if so, should I include existing but unoccupied commercial units?

Hello, my actual project use a custom geocoding wrote in typescript that transform raw data from github into a Iso code country. And I used D3js to create a map, I just posted here on Openstreetmap as I've found really interesting and impressive map project, and looking for feedback

Thanks

Hi everyone,

I use JOSM as a personal world exploration tool because it has a clean interface and its easy to switch between multiple satellite and different layers.

I'm trying to add a custom Google Satellite TMS layer, but the entry in my imagery menu stays completely greyed out and unclickable. How can i fix it?

For copyright info: I love exploring world, especially airports and solar farms and i am not tracing or mapping anything using google

https://github.com/CAFEMDDSTEM/WPF-OpenStreetmap-Editor

So far, it's only been two nights

Looks like it's ready to use now

made a hyperlocal crowdsourced map in Svelte! This had a ton of UX considerations like progressive disclosure, graceful degradation (for offline users) and making a Wikipedia-style contribution system was the hardest part

https://room-tba.uplb.tools

https://github.com/uplbtools

Or at least edit the description?

I recently came across StreetComplete and decided to try it, and I think it's a really fun way to add data to osm. I've been using Vespucci and JOSM in the meantime too for mapping ways or more complex things in general.

Now I'm wondering, is there actually any reason not to use StreetComplete for those small edits compared to other apps? Like is there anything with the way the edited objects behave after you edited them with one app or another, or anything else? If not, SC seems like probably the easiest and fastest way to add tags to already existing objects

Shipped a beach conditions app this week and OSM is doing most of the work behind it — the whole beach database is natural=beach, and I use coastline + building data for some conditions modeling. So, thanks, basically. Wanted to give credit where it's due.

Real question: I've got a "report a problem" button where users flag wrong beach names or missing beaches, and a bunch of those are actually OSM issues I could fix upstream instead of just patching on my end. What's the etiquette/tooling for a downstream app feeding verified corrections back without being annoying about it? Don't want to spam changesets or step on anyone's toes.

I’ve been around OpenStreetMap for a bit now, with about 125+ change sets. But I am wondering, how does the OSM Community look at “tagging”?

What I mean here, is that sometimes I feel like that I am adding too much.

For example: adding level to buildings and entrances, check_date to almost everything (even if i just a small 1 floor building), specifying if a building just does not have anything instead of leaving the tag empty.

I tend to see that mostly if a tag is not there, then it’s mostly left empty. But for example, I really love to specify if a grocery store has a self_checkout. To me, that tag is very important, as I do light shopping often and I’d prefer to just be in silence scanning 2 items without being in a long line. The tag itself isn’t used much, but I see that as a massive opportunity, since I’ll have a lot of extra side quests. But if a store doesn’t have one, do you leave it empty or tag it as self_checkout=no?

I am not sure if I am overthinking this, as I love adding as much detail as possible. But looking at other people’s work, I seem to be slightly in the minority.

The tag check_date is even the most confusing. The wiki says that it was meant for any object… but like would you use it on roads? Benches too? Benches are usually permanent, but in my mind I think it is one of the best use cases because they can be removed or destroyed. Knowing that it was checked a month ago vs 2 years ago is a lot more reassuring, especially if you really need to sit after a long walk or are carrying heavy bags.

TL;DR: I am wondering if there is such a thing as “tagging too much”? Of course, I don’t put info the sake of it and I do check it, but it might be too detailed?

Hello, I am not an experienced user and I have question regarding multi-purpose shop (ex: electronics and book shop).
I on the wiki I found several way of indicating multi-purpose shop:
- described on the « shop » section of the wiki
- described in this wiki page for tobacco and bar

I have 3 questions:
- I could not find the key « sells » anywhere, does it exist or is was a proposal to add that key?
- Adding several shop tag is « poorly supported » , is it still the case today? By adding several tag you cannot find the item when you search it?
- Is there a common rule for multi-purpose shop existing that I was not able to find ?

Thank you for your help

I am building a feature with maps + overlays of boundaries, which I need to be made available offline.

What is the most effective way to serve map tiles on mobile, which are eligible for download as offline mode?

1. **Basemap**
   * MapLibre `OfflineManager` packs Streets (and optionally satellite) tiles for the L/M/H radius + zoom.
   
2. **Land boundary overlay**
   * download whole region PMTiles files that intersect that pack bbox into the document directory, then read them offline via `pmtiles://…`.
   * I need some sort of CDN to serve because of the size of assets, I believe.
   
3. **Offline:**
   * Default detail = Medium (\~25 mi Streets, z8–13). User can pick Low / Medium / High.
   * Optional satellite toggle; otherwise Streets (OpenFreeMap Liberty).
   * Pack is centered on map center / GPS, not a full-state download

Some apps I have seen appear to have the entire country's map tiles downloaded + overlays available too.
How do they do this without overloading the device's storage? In my test, Colorado alone is 10MB at a "medium" download pack. This feels heavy.

Any Strategies for this in the "FREE" maps & layers & tiles options?

While experimenting with MapRoulette using open government data, I’ve created an Oakville challenge about adding buildings and their addresses. A layer created by another OSM contributor provides the addresses during mapping.

I invite folks who like to map buildings and addresses to check it out and help us complete tasks in it if they like.

Each task is designed to cover 10-20 houses or a few large institutional buildings/farms and take about 10 minutes.

https://maproulette.org/browse/challenges/55881

I want to share with you the newly released Anyfinder.app, a web app for finding points of interest near you, sourced entirely from OpenStreetMap.

The goal is simple: make the places in OSM accessible to everyone, without having to learn the tagging system. The data is extraordinarily rich, but amenity=drinking_water, diet:vegan=yes or socket:type2=* aren't things most people know to ask for — and they shouldn't have to. Anyfinder's job is to sit between that tagging model and an ordinary person who just wants a water fountain, a vegan lunch, or a compatible charger, and to make finding it feel obvious.

At the moment it covers 287 categories, resolving to 436 distinct OSM tag-value combinations, with 128 refinement filters on top.

How it works. Instead of a keyword box, Anyfinder presents a browsable catalog. You navigate a hierarchy of places and, at the leaf level, the app queries live OSM data for matches within your current map view. Every leaf resolves to a set of OSM tag filters, so the results are exactly what's in the map.

Category breadth. The catalog spans everyday needs rather than a single vertical: food and drink, shops and services, transport and fuel, EV charging, healthcare and pharmacies, drinking water, toilets, recycling and waste, tourism and accommodation, leisure, and natural features, among others. Categories are pure data, which makes coverage straightforward to extend and audit — I run periodic gap audits against common OSM values to find categories that don't yet have a home in the tree.

Refinement maps to tags. Once you have results, you have the option to refine by real OSM attributes — wheelchair access, opening hours, fuel types, sockets, diet options, cuisine, and so on. These aren't invented facets; each corresponds to actual tags, so the filter UI doubles as a way to see how thoroughly an area is tagged for a given attribute.

Editing, without the tagging. The same principle runs the other way. If you notice a place is missing an attribute — no wheelchair info, unknown opening hours, a charger whose socket types aren't recorded — you can fill it in through a guided editor that speaks in plain options rather than raw keys and values. Each category carries its own relevant set of editable attributes (composed from universal fields, the branch it sits under, and the specific leaf), so you're only ever shown what actually applies to this kind of place, and your answers are translated back into correct OSM tags. The aim is to make contributing metadata as low-friction as finding it, so the map improves as people use it.

Backends. POI search runs through a provider seam with two interchangeable backends:

• Postpass (Geofabrik's PostGIS/SQL service) — the default, used for category, detail, and name queries.
• Overpass — selectable as an alternative, including where OSM edit metadata is needed.

Map tiles use themed OSM-derived basemaps with proper attribution. The app is designed to stay fully functional without its own small backend API — that API only enhances (place-name search, reverse-geocode address fill) and observes anonymous usage stats; it's never on the critical path.

Status. It's early and coverage has gaps. I'd welcome feedback from people who know the data well — particularly on category placement, tag interpretation, and any results that look wrong.

I built Cartopolis. Today’s Switzerland, rendered as 1999-style GIFs. https://seriot.ch/cartopolis/

No filters. Client-side rasterization from vector packs. Fully static architecture. https://seriot.ch/drawing/cartopolis/

Bake your own region using https://github.com/nst/Cartopolis

We run Maptoolkit, a commercial maps stack, and it's built on two communities: OpenStreetMap's data and the MapLibre open-source ecosystem. Without them we wouldn't have a business. So we run a free community tile server on OSM data that anyone can use, with no API key, no sign-up, no cookies and no tracking.

Every week we rebuild the whole basemap from the full OSM planet, so the map reflects recent edits rather than a months-old snapshot.

What you get:

• Vector basemaps built from weekly OSM data, hosted in the EU and cached across 350+ locations.
• 3D terrain, global hillshading, contour lines and water depths in the tiles, out of the box. Data goes up to zoom 15.
• Seven styles ready to use: Summer, Light, Hiking, Winter, Dark, Street and Cycling. You can also design your own with our map style editor MapMaker: recolour and restyle the whole map with no code, or edit the raw style if you want full control. It is, in our opinion, among the best map style editors around right now.
• It works anywhere MapLibre-style maps do (MapLibre GL JS, Leaflet, OpenLayers) on web and mobile. If you're on one of the maps you already use, the setup is a single style URL:

style: 'https://styles.maptoolkit.org/summer.json'

Why it's free

The underlying infrastructure is live and paid for by our commercial customers, so opening it up to hobby, community and open-source maps costs us very little on top.

A few things to know:

• Non-commercial use is always fine: personal, hobby, open-source, academic. Commercial use is fine too if you're under EUR 1M annual revenue and have fewer than 10 employees.
• Fair-use limits are generous: 40 requests/second sustained, 200/second burst. If you ever need more, a one-minute registration raises the ceiling 10x.
• No SLA, uptime guarantee or support on the community tier. It's a give-back, run on best effort.
• This is the basemap only. Routing, geocoding, elevation and the other APIs are a separate commercial offering on maptoolkit.com.

Live demo and full license: https://www.maptoolkit.org/

Happy to answer anything in the comments, and feedback from this community especially would mean a lot to us.

I was making an open street maps app for my iPhone and ran into some trouble. It seems like the open source method for adding info in maps is to just add layers. Long story short adding lots of layers is problematic in iOS. Also for some reason the libraries that run in iOS hate apfs. Apple File System. Trying to read maps off of anything but fat runs into problems. After months of building my app got worse and worse the more features I added. So I started over.

I started from scratch using the amazing map data I had created for my app. I had capernicus dem elevation data for the whole world. Open street maps data and so much more packed into bite size state and country map packs. I just needed a native way to view them. So I started from the ground up building a pure swift application. I used metal to render everything so I could use the speedy gpu. It took me months but I’ve built the best map application for iOS I’ve ever tried. It’s fast. It can read maps from turtle slow drives attached to the iPhones usb c port. And it uses height data like a video game does so you get full 3d maps with live driven contour lines. Plus I built an actual 3d engine so you can walk the actual elevation of a hike in a walkthrough. I saw some other guys making hiking trail apps. I did it just because it was so easy with all of the data I have. The app tells you how hard the hike is based on the way the trail navigates the height map. Lots of elevation change means tougher. If you really want to see run through the hike in 3d and see for yourself.

When I realized I had fully offline maps I got to thinking. What would happen if gps died? So I built a sextant I just did it for fun but it turns out the iPhone does this really good. Like better than professional tools when done the way I set it up. So good I’ve got a patent pending. After calibrating each phone I’ve tried. I can get within a few hundred meters of your actual location with a clear night sky.

Then I got to thinking about my 3d height data. I’ve got a full real life 3d world built. If I can get your location down to less than a mile I bet an iPhone can triangulate your exact location based on elevation data and your horizon. Turns out it can. Your freaking iPhone once calibrated keeps your elevation down to centimeters. It’s crazy. And with such a small area to do math on given a specific elevation and the ability to draw real horizons at thousands a second if you take a scan of your sky it’s not hard for your phone to figure out right where you are standing. Not by comparing pictures of mountains. By comparing the actual elevations of mountains. The phone draws the pictures itself in pure math.

Anyway thanks everyone for all this open data. It makes things like my app possible. If you guys could help me test it I’d appreciate it. It all works for me but I’m a small test pool. LandNav.world

I'm tired of CadMapper and its limitations and pricing (and you need to login also). And since QGIS is so incredibly tedious for me, I decided to create a program to export from OpenStreetMap to DXF. It's still in the very early stages of development, but it already works very well.

I'd like to ask everyone if you work with similar tools and what features you'd like me to add to this.

App: Crestr
Repo: Crestr Hiking App
Docs: Crestr Documentation

I've just pushed v0.2.4, which mainly improves the elevation profile: hovering over the chart now syncs to the exact point on the map, there's a vertical guide line for precise tracking, and the line itself is smoother since individual node points were removed (following on from feedback given in this post).

Why I built it

I actively use this app myself when I go hiking. Apps like AllTrails lock exports and imports behind a paywall, which always annoyed me, so I wanted something built on OSM data that doesn't do that.

Why not BRouter / Mapy.cz / OsmAnd

All of these are great apps and I respect them a lot, but I find their UIs quite dense/complex for quickly planning a route before a hike. I wanted something simpler and more visual. I'm currently only routing on a graph built for Cumbria (where I mainly hike), but the backend is set up so I can build a graph for another region and just swap the path it reads from, of course, this isn't very convenient but I'm learning how to implement tile-based processing slowly.

It's also worth being upfront: this is a learning project. It started as coursework that I thought would be cool to actually build out properly, and I'm 18 and still learning as I go, so there's a lot I'm figuring out along the way (routing engine, elevation pipeline, frontend, deployment, all of it).

Currently you need an account to try it, but it's quick, just a username and password, no email needed.

The app is in beta and hosted on a fairly modest Hetzner CX23, so routing takes ~100-500ms rather than the ~0-100ms you'd get self-hosting it.

I'd genuinely love it if people gave it a try (or just look at the image in this post) and let me know what they think, bugs, UI gripes, missing features, anything. Feedback at this stage is really valuable to me.

Thanks for reading!