OSM Mapper/Feature Requests

Please provide your own suggestions for improvements to OSM Mapper here. We will use this page as the main point of communication with the community for the product.

Outstanding requests

• Create a RSS feed for "modification" made on data initially created by a given user. In fact I'd like to know when nodes/ways I've created are modified. Since I obviously know these places (I've mapped/contribute to it) I can check that there is no unintentional vandalism. I think it would add an important Quality Assurance to OSM if such feeds are possible. (BTW, thanks again for this awesome tool!)

• Great idea. We will have a think about how to do that one PeterIto 06:12, 2 September 2008 (UTC)

+1 just in order to show some others like me are still interested in such a feature sletuffe 10:55, 17 November 2009 (UTC)

+1 as this would be very useful --Olejorgenb 08:59, 8 May 2011 (BST)

• It is on your list above, but point features would be really useful (eg amenities) Steve8 18:59, 21 July 2008 (UTC)

• Point noted. This is now our one of our top priorities PeterIto 06:12, 2 September 2008 (UTC)

• Is it possible to show deleted Objects in the map with all the information about them? I imagine a feature like pressing "U" in Potlatch.--Master 07:30, 22 July 2008 (UTC)

• Yes, I agree we need to do something about deleted features. It is now one of our top prioritiesPeterIto 08:36, 26 October 2008 (UTC)

• The option to generate batch reports for bigger areas, not displayed at the moment and generated on low priority --PerroVerd 07:45, 22 July 2008 (UTC)

• We will see what we can do PeterIto 06:12, 2 September 2008 (UTC)

• We have now increased the size of the area you can monitor Shane28R

• It can be quite hard to see small changes. If you go to a show feature page, I wonder if you could highlight the feature with an arrow or some such. (Maybe toggleable?) Davidearl 13:12, 27 July 2008 (UTC)

• Agreed. This is something we will resolve in the future (along with deleted nodes and point features) PeterIto 06:12, 2 September 2008 (UTC)

• It would be really nice if a session showed not just what was changed but what changes were made, e.g. new, amended or deleted (if you can do deleted), and then for each tag: new, or previous value, or unchanged. Davidearl 12:56, 29 July 2008 (UTC)

• We do now provide a link to the OSM feature details page (OSM Data) which goes part way to this but we will be doing more on this in the future. PeterIto 06:12, 2 September 2008 (UTC)

• I suggested something like: Mary St is now oneway & nodes moved; Frank Rd deleted; Railway Hotel pub added+tagged opening hours etc. BlueMM 05:07, 30 October 2008 (UTC)

• The two purple colours (3rd and 4th highlighted items) are quite similar and hard to see on the map if a lot of features interweave. This happens with all the blues but isn't important (as often) because they're lower down on the list. - LastGrape/Gregory (LwD) 01:26, 16 September 2008 (UTC)

• There are choices of colour pallets available, some with less colours which are clearer and some with more colours that are less clear. Good point though about making the ones at the top of the list more distinct. We will see what we can do.PeterIto 16:24, 25 October 2008 (UTC)

• When viewing changes, there should be a transparent image with the coloured changes overlayed onto the grey basemap image, so the "mixing" is happening on the client and not on the server. The reason is that I mostly access ITO's OSM from a computer at home on dialup, and the images take forever to view, if after the first viewing, other change pages would be very fast to load and reduce bandwidth usage.

• It would also save us from rendering lots of detail every time. No promises but we we take another look at this PeterIto 12:22, 10 March 2009 (UTC)

• (I think this might be hard to implement), is that Area's can be non-rectangular. I'd like to freeform draw a perimeter around the area I'm interested, even if it is rather course, it would still have 20-30 corners at least. Currently I've set up "grids" of areas to pick up the sections I'm interested in, and ignore other bits. But it's not precise enough, plus hard to change when I map new areas and will want to track them as well. BlueMM 05:07, 30 October 2008 (UTC)

• Though the suggestion for only "modification" to objects I've touched listed above would help a lot. BlueMM 05:07, 30 October 2008 (UTC)

• It would be nice if the "New area" page defaulted to the last location & zoom, instead of the world & having to zoom & pan a million times. Maybe users could set a default home location, or jump to a specific lat/lon. BlueMM 05:07, 30 October 2008 (UTC)

• We have made selecting a new area more elegant, but will look at your suggestion again PeterIto 12:22, 10 March 2009 (UTC)

• It would be nice to have a slippy map. Besides generating the areas on-demand, map tiles could be generated every week or month. Ivansanchez 13:44, 11 December 2008 (UTC)

• Agreed. We will see what we can do. PeterIto 12:22, 10 March 2009 (UTC)

• Is it possible to export OSM XML matching the current filters. XAPI could be used to do this (Simon Ward)

• It is now possible to export as KML which is good for some purposes. We will look at OSM XML export and others in due course PeterIto 12:22, 10 March 2009 (UTC)

• Add OR functionality to the filter. This would allow users to filter for example for "All bicycle related edits" by filtering by tags highways=cycleways OR tags bicycle * (motp)

• An apostrophe (') in a tag value appears to get displayed as ' (' in the HTML source) (Simon Ward)

• Apostrophe's are now working, however we seem to have problems with some other tag values, such as B&Q

• Change the filename of the export image to something more useful (i.e. from export.png to gaza_city.png)

• Good idea PeterIto 12:22, 10 March 2009 (UTC)

• Add a link to Edit in JOSM (requested by Hakan Tandogan)

• Would it be possible to inform users about changes on their Data ? something like a "ito watchdog" that informs me about changes on my data by other users. It would be a great help and timesafer so i don't have to log in myself as often and check everything myself. I believe it would also help preventing 'vandalism' and keep up the osm quality and support the network of the community itself. (requested by Mario)

• I do have one question, when I choose to look at the OSM Map for an object the map displays with the maplint layer switched on. Is this intended? Can I switch this off by default? (requested by Chris Hill)

• Would be nice to have non square areas to watch. For me it's pretty ok since the place I want to watch is an island, but to get all of it without including the stuff around I need something non square. (requested by tartan)

• Monitoring a user's mappings: It would be nice to see if anybody else edits what I've mapped before. Usually a user is mostly interested in what he himself mapped and if anybody changes them afterwards. A date filter would be helpful to filter out old mappings.

• Not really a feature request but some layers are buggy (for example building heights highlight an object with one version created by myself and I'm sure it doesn't contain anything but building=yes :)) and would be nice to be able to see the layer definitions behind to see what the layer really want to show. (And it's not clear to be how am I supposed to report bugs; I was directed to the OSM mapper page where there's no discussion and coming here isn't perfect either.) --grin ✎ 11:48, 14 April 2011 (BST)

Completed Requests

• Can the page layout be designed to work better with a smaller screen?

• Good point. We will take a look at this soon PeterIto 13:24, 21 July 2008 (UTC)

• We have redesigned the screen to make better use so it should hopefully now be better Shane28R

• I'd like the HTML Title of each page to be something like eg. "$Area-$session ITO OSM", so that when you have many tabs open (or bookmark), you can tell them apart. BlueMM 05:07, 30 October 2008 (UTC)

• When looking at the details for a way it would be nice to have a link to the data browser (http://www.openstreetmap.org/browse/way/<id>). (Tom Hughes)

• Will do, we should be able to do this very quickly PeterIto 12:57, 21 July 2008 (UTC)

• Done PeterIto 06:12, 2 September 2008 (UTC)

• When following a link into the site the login screen may appear if you are not logged in, but entering your details leaves you on the default view rather than the view you were trying to link to (Tom Hughes).

• This is a more annoying problem. Thanks for pointing it out and we will try to resolve it soon, until then remember that if you pre sign-in then it will work properly. We may extend the time you remain signed in to help with this. PeterIto 12:57, 21 July 2008 (UTC)

• Done PeterIto 06:12, 2 September 2008 (UTC)

• If I click on the link to the session in a RSS feed (I guess any session link that isn't coming from the browser - eg. in an email - would do this, it's not specific to RSS), and I'm not already logged in in the browser, it goes to the log in page as expected. If I log in (correctly), it then comes back to the login page again, and if I re-enter my password, it then goes to the first area, not the session. If I am logged in in the browser, clicking the original link does go to the session. So it looks like the redirection after the first login page is not happening as intended. Davidearl 13:12, 27 July 2008 (UTC)

• This should now be working correctly PeterIto 06:12, 2 September 2008 (UTC)

• The algorithm works out what to include using the bounding boxes of ways, so that you can get some spurious results included, e.g. the Rotterdam-Torshavn ferry showing up in SW Scotland Jono 12:59, 28 July 2008 (UTC)

• This should now be fixed PeterIto 06:12, 2 September 2008 (UTC)

• Sorting of keys alphabetically and sorting by number Sven Anders 14:05, 21 July 2008 (UTC)

• You can already sort keys alphabetically but clicking on the value column header. Do you want something else beyond this? PeterIto 06:12, 2 September 2008 (UTC)

• My only trouble with it is that it seems to have trouble with non-ascii characters wherever they appear. The image export renders "í" as "FFFFC3FFFFAD" (see [1]), and when viewing user statistics it doesn't include users with non-ascii names (see [2]) even if the user(s) in question have the most contributions to the area. Ævar Arnfjörð Bjarmason <avarab [at] gmail.com>

• Same problem reported by Alexander Helm

• Could there also be a link to the OSM Data history page, I find that I need to always look at the history to see what changed (though even then it's hard to tell). BlueMM 05:07, 30 October 2008 (UTC)
  • Also, please make the link to OSM Data a normal link, instead of open a new window. I find it annoying and breaks my workflow, because I have already opened each session into it's own tab. It's not hard to manually open in a window or tab if needed. BlueMM 05:07, 30 October 2008 (UTC)

• I still get the problem of having to login twice and then being taken to my first area. - LastGrape/Gregory (LwD) 01:14, 16 September 2008 (UTC)

• Yes, sorry, we had to roll back this fix for some reason. We will get it back asap.PeterIto 16:24, 25 October 2008 (UTC)

• URLencode link in activation email - namely email (had to manually replace '+' with '%2B' in email) --Stefanb 17:41, 21 July 2008 (UTC)

• Bookmark to special pages would be nice, (Example want to see postal_code on all highway but not on highway=service and highway=motorway, you need a little time to define this... ; ) Sven Anders

• We will do something internally within the product at some point but for now if you create a good view then you can save it as a browser bookmark. PeterIto 06:12, 2 September 2008 (UTC)

• we now allow people to create their own 'views' into the data which I think is the answer to this one.PeterIto 16:19, 11 March 2009 (UTC)