ok so i’m trying to understand the structure of the whole OSM project. i generally like it but it’s confusing and i’m confused.
i’m specifically looking for satellite image data (landscape as seen from above, no infrastructure data, just real photography). i like satellite images a lot because it provides a much better feel for the landscape than infrastructure data alone. such as: how many trees are there, how much nature is there around, …
does OSM itself do this? (ideally without having to be logged in)
i found OpenMapTiles which seems to also provide satellite data; but i’m not sure what their relation to OSM is. are they a separate project?
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There is a separate project, OpenArealMap, for Free as in Freedom areal/satellite images. Most useful images are proprietary though. Some, like Bing, allow limited usage of their images for improving OSM, some don’t.
OSM doesn’t do this, but there are freely licensed satellite images out there. Usually they are produced by or for national governments and often ended up freely licensed precisely because OSM people asked for that…
For my country this is basemap.at and it would actually be an interesting project to aggregate such things in one UI, but I am not aware anyone has done that yet.
@schnurrito @gandalf_der_12te an ‘open mosaic’ has been done multiple times however a) it is a lot of work and cost even if the imagery is “free”, b) while there is a lot of high res (that is 30cm or better nominal resolution) data available most of the world isn’t covered.
Do you have an example of that?
@gandalf_der_12te it’s quite a common misconception that OpenStreetMap is a map, and arguably its name and the website showing a map don’t really help there.
But it really is just a database of coordinates and tags that describe features found and those coordinates. You can use this database to generate maps, and there are several projects that do this.
Another common misconception is that what Google and other big players call “Satellite” view or images is rarely 1/2
taken with satellites. You’d have clouds in the way, very low resolution, and other issues. The higher quality ones are aerial images and this is what people are usually looking for. There are a couple sources listed at https://osm.wiki/Vertical_Aerial_Photographs
Getting these to display in an application depends on the application, and there is no “OSM application” except for maybe the iD editor. Everything else is developed by third parties. 2/2
No, OpenStreetMap has no aerial imagery of their own.
Editors like iD and JOSM and end-user apps like OsmAnd rely on third-party imagery for overlays, and the most prominent among these is Bing.
OpenStreetMap under the hood is simply a database of key–value pairs assigned to nodes, lines, polygons, and “relations” between those three.
Edit: And yes, OpenMapTiles is a separate thing, and any of its aerial imagery would also not be its own. It’s prohibitively difficult for but a few select organizations to maintain aerial imagery like that. You can read more here.
Not seeing the option in osmand, but I’d love to know if it’s a possibility
OsmAnd is not OpenStreetMap. Its a third party client to the OpenStreetMap data.
OsmAnd can have aerial imagery, Configure Map > Map Source ( > Add More ) > Microsoft Hybrid
