r/openstreetmap

I run a small free map of hot springs, public saunas, swimming holes and clothing optional beaches. Around 10,600 of the pins came out of an OSM import. About 120 were written by an actual person. The legal status on the imported ones is inferred from tags, which is a guess, so nearly all of them carry an "uncertain" flag.

Here's what bothers me. On the map as it stands, an imported pin and a pin that four separate people have physically confirmed look exactly the same. That's the most dishonest thing about the whole project and it's my own doing.

Where I've landed is hollow grey for unverified, solid blue for confirmed, red for gone or closed. I ran those through a colourblind check because my first attempt had green for good and orange for risky, and under protanopia those two came out at a delta E of 5.6, which is to say the two pins that must never be confused were the two that merged. Lesser warnings ride as a small corner badge now instead of becoming a fourth colour.

Two things I'd like input on from people who deal with this more than I do.

First, is there a convention for showing "this came from an import and nobody has checked it" that users actually read correctly? Everything I try either gets ignored completely or makes the map look broken.

When a user tells me a spot is wrong, what's the etiquette on getting that back into OSM? I don't want to hoard corrections in my own database. I also don't want to fire a stranger's unverified comment at OSM as an edit.

Map is at nanitch.com if looking helps. It's free and there's nothing to sign up for.

I've been importing hot springs, saunas and clothing optional spots and my Overpass filter was just ["nudism"]. Seemed reasonable at the time.

It isn't. Mappers record nudism=no just as diligently as nudism=yes, so that filter hands you every campground and municipal beach where somebody took the trouble to write down that nudity is not allowed. On one 12 state US run it was 109 of 245 results. A KOA, a splash pad, and something called Head of the Ditch Campground, all imported straight onto a clothing optional map. Germany alone dropped 304 of them once I fixed it.

Entirely my bug. The tag is doing exactly what it should.

The fix, if it saves anyone else the trouble:

["nudism"]["nudism"!~"^(no|prohibited)$"]

Posting it because I doubt I'm the only person who has made this mistake.

Separate thing while I'm here. The import turned up a lot of what look like real duplicates. Same place mapped twice under slightly different names, sometimes a few hundred metres apart. My favourite is one spot in Sicily that exists three times, as Scugghiera naturista Rocca Palumma, Scugghjera naturista Rocca Palumma, and Scogliera naturista Rocca Palumba.

I have a list of these and I'd rather help clean them up than just take the data. What's the format people actually want? I'm not going to dump fifty automated notes on whoever maps that area without asking first.

I'm making this post partly to raise awareness and partly to express frustration regarding the increasing attention being placed on "Flock Cameras" specifically in Canada, and why unverified OSM data is making the problem worse.

I'm sure everyone is aware of the flock camera situation in the States and the increasingly political discussion surrounding them. What I've noticed over the past few weeks is some anonymous users have begun adding these "flock cameras" to various points in Canada (despite there being no clear evidence that flock is installing any infrastructure here).

Here are a few examples (though there are many more):
https://www.openstreetmap.org/node/14015608501
https://www.openstreetmap.org/node/14086528901
https://www.openstreetmap.org/node/14070964201
https://www.openstreetmap.org/node/14053445101

These unverified surveillance nodes from brand new users (contributing directly from deflock and panopti websites) have been the subject of mass hysteria in several community facebook groups and subreddits I am a part of.

Part of the issue is that panopti renders any node tagged with surveillance=public, leading many to believe that "they're installing flock cameras everywhere". I've seen some people mistakenly claiming the ALPR cameras along the 407 ETR in Ontario are flock cameras, which is not the case at all.

I don't think there's a perfect solution, but I wanted to open up a discussion on this issue because it doesn't sit right with me to see people FREAKING out over something that does not exist. My hope would be that panopti and deflock would be clearer about why OSM as a data source is simply not authoritative, and I implore any mappers to watch out for these unverified cameras being added in their local areas, try to lay eyes on what is on the ground to fix any potential errors!

You will learn how to detect and vectorize any feature from satellite or drone imagery directly inside QGIS

• It covers : Automatic Mode: Scan an entire area with text prompts to batch-extract features in seconds
• Semi-Auto Mode: Extract single, complex objects with one click for maximum control
• Shape Regularization: Automatically square building corners and clean up polygon boundaries
• And basically just the full Workflow: Edit vertices, adjust confidence filters, and export clean layers with attribute data

We pushed a lots of updates recently so a tuto was definitely needed haha, hope it will help

I'm in the US. One of my hobbies is exploring abandon roads. Anyway to find them on OSM?

I've tried overpass-turbo.eu (uses OSM database) with highway=abandoned or disused:highway=* or abandoned:highway=* but the results were inconsistent and didn't have abandon roads I've identified.

Thanks for the help.

A few years ago, I created a large-scale map of New Bedford by stitching together detailed survey maps from 1913. My goal was simple: I wanted to be able to zoom in and see individual streets, buildings, and points of interest, then zoom back out and see the city as a whole, without having to switch between separate map plates.

The resulting image was enormous, though, and at the time it was never especially practical to use. I finally got around to importing it into GIS software and georeferencing it, matching points on the historical map to their real-world coordinates so the entire thing could be overlaid accurately in Google Earth.

The result turned out pretty cool. As far as I know, this may be the most detailed single, continuous map of New Bedford from that period, rather than a collection of separate plates or maps at different scales.

Hello. New to this reddit...and just found out about OSM...AMAZING! But I have the same problem with their routing as I do with Google Maps. We live in a house positioned on a flag lot. We do not share the driveway. Physically, our house is closer to a small dirt road behind the house than the street where our driveway opens up. Routing always sends people to the dirt road behind the house rather than to our driveway. Problem is...the dirt road is separated from our property by a 5 meter wide "canal" and it is impossible to access our house across. We live in the Netherlands.

Any ideas on how to fix this?

https://preview.redd.it/kdamfvjb4pjh1.png?width=2034&format=png&auto=webp&s=e3d15a1bd7676caa2d4ee542702861e1ed347246

I used Chat GPT to make the website an app for convenience. The android APK file is not published but I can send it to you if interested.

My original motivation for getting off Google maps is political. I could not accept that they renamed the Gulf of Mexico to the Gulf of America so I found an open source alternative map website but I want it as an app.

No more gulf of America for me. It works just fine as an app although the convenience of voice navigation and some GPS and pin location features could be lacking.

It is a very usable map. I think the fact that corporations can just leverage maps for propaganda without the ability to opt out was a warning call for the need to be less reliant on their services.

Ive been contributing to OSM for some time and recently a question crossed my mind.

Its a bit less relevant to cities, but whats your opinion about all the local semi-private data that you upload about your hiking routes and other not so trackable stuff that people might not really know about in general public?

Not necessarily tracking you by your own contributions and clues from the changelog but
If google or some other bad agent were to track you they would instantly gain the knowledge of all the little tiny routes that someone else had put down through the forest that possibly few people know about.

Taken person not even knowing about the existence of OSM would get tracked going through his usual hiking routes.(Average person isn't assuming that every nook and cranny would be mapped, I was surprised when I first heard about OSM)

How do you feel that it might be possibly used to track you and other people down when they possibly go out of the zone that they could have been trackable in, for example by your phone scanning local wifi routers.

idk where all the big corporations are going with this.

Your contributions might be used for mass surveillance because there are many routes that wouldnt be known otherwise.

I dont live in US but imagine walking past the flock camera. They might not know where the path leads to but they can potentially limit the search to the paths that some person added to OSM for more accurate results.

But on the other hand it could help emergency rescuers guess your location, so idk.

well after all it feels like a gray area where you might want people to not go your route just because you want it your own, you are hiding something or someone's being chased by police(then it would be useful to be mapped). it goes all over the place.

There is an area near me that has a road that is basically cut into a hill, such that there are a sequence of cliffs and ledges on each side of the road. These are clearly visible on LiDAR maps that have been made of the area but OpenTopoMap basically has this area smoothed over. Is there a way that the contour lines can be altered to reflect these elevations correctly

Hey r/openstreetmap - I've been building Cliff, a privacy-first Android and iOS (coming soon) maps app built entirely on OSM. Stack is Valhalla for routing, Photon for geocoding, PMTiles for tiles, and Postgres. No Google, no Apple, no tracking. Still early but the landing page + waitlist is live at cliffmaps.com. Would love feedback from this community specifically since you're the reason the project is possible.

I’m building a browser driving prototype where the starting point can be a real public road. OSM is the road/source layer; I compile a bounded driving graph and stream only a local corridor around the player.

This week I added traffic demand. Important clarification: this is not live traffic data. It is a gameplay model informed by the local road/world context, then deliberately capped. Reykjavík should feel sparse; Shibuya should feel pressured; neither should become a literal simulation of rush hour.

The edge cases I’m still watching are driving side, divided roads, complex junctions, service roads that look too important, and what happens when the source geometry is sparse or malformed.

If you work with OSM-derived routing, I’d genuinely like to know which tag/geometry mistakes usually create the worst false road hierarchy. Playable example: https://world-drive-game.vercel.app