Tile Abuse

Are you seeing a message about "unauthorised downloads"?

OpenStreetMap's servers are run entirely on donated resources. They have strictly limited capacity.

Some applications download lots of map tiles from our servers. Unlike Google et al, we don't have the money to pay for all these downloads. These applications are abusing individuals' donations and the sponsorship which pay for our servers. (Here's a list of the kind people who recently donated to help us buy a new server.)

So that everyone gets a chance to view our map, and so that (most important of all) the servers are available for our own users to edit it, we have to block applications which download too many tiles in a short time.

Please contact the developer of the application, and encourage them not to download tiles in bulk from openstreetmap.org. We'd still love it if they were to use our maps, but a better alternative is for them to set up their own tileserver, or use a third-party service.

Are you a developer?

Please see Tile usage policy for full details. If you have any questions feel free to contact us in our IRC channel. We won't bite. Honestly. We love that you make our maps more popular. We just don't have the resources to feed bulk downloads of tiles.

Message Tile

Map tile served in case of suspected abuse: tile.openstreetmap.org/abuse.png