I‘ve seen it mentioned a few times as being superior to the iD editor but the learning curve seems somewhat steep. I started mapping areas in Vietnam that haven‘t gotten much love so far and I encountered a few limitations with the iD editor. The buildings in Vietnam are a pain to map. Is it better in the long run to learn JOSM for this use case?
I almost exclusively edit with JOSM now.
It’s intimidating because there is a lot going on and there are a lot of buttons everywhere. That makes it tricky to find what you need.
Take it slow, and only learn the parts that you need to complete your task. Then you can slowly start learning more and more.
The biggest change is that you will have to manually download the area you want to work on. The iD editor automatically downloads where you are zoomed in on. JOSM, you need to click the download button and then select the area.
I find one of the big advantages of JOSM is the shortcuts, and those simply take time to memorize them one by one.
You’ll want to make use of plugins, too. Under Edit > Preferences > Plugins, you’ll want to select these
building_tools
utilsplugin2
mapwithai
Those provide a lot of helpful tools for working with buildings.
Another thing to be mindful of is the Validator. It’s a helpful tool that will automatically check all of the work that you have done to make sure it meets best practices, like if you forgot a tag or if two tags don’t match.
It runs when you click upload, and it will only validate the work you have done. If you manually run it, it will validate everything that’s been loaded even if you haven’t worked on it.
Consider the warnings, but I often find there are a few warnings that don’t apply to what I have changed, and they can be ignored. You simply just continue the upload.