I started contributing to OSM recently after a bike trail was built near me. The arial imagery typically takes years to refresh around here so I walked it a few times to capture GPX tracks and then drew the new path. It was exciting to see my contribution percolate out to various apps that depend on OSM, and meanwhile Google and Apple have both ignored my edit suggestions and deny the path exists.
So I have a fairly fresh newcomer's perspective and here's what I suggest to get started: keep it simple and start local. As others have noted, skip the complex mapping app and go straight to the website for feature edits, or download a simple mobile app like Every Door and focus on businesses and landmarks near you. Go on a walk around your neighborhood and look for old/incorrect/missing businesses. There may be errors near you about places you actually care about, and it is really gratifying to fix those.
There were restaurants near me that were missing, shops that had changed hands, etc., that were easy fixes but years overdue. I captured some basics (names, posted hours, the phone number posted on the door, etc.) with Every Door, and then later logged into the main OSM website and fine-tuned the entries. I got into a pattern of fixing one or two entries every evening when I went out for a walk and pretty soon my walking route was all up-to-date. Then I started paying attention to things like stop signs and cross walks and found a whole new kind of little, incremental edits that nobody else was doing.
It's been fun, I've made useful contributions, and my laptop is still Java free.
Every Door is definitely one of the easier ones and I like it but dang I wish the dev could get more funding to make it a nicer UX. Between the glitchy raster tiles and need to click load data all the time I feel it gets tiring fast.
I've considered building a separate app that's similar but oriented around the idea of using voice of pictures to update things (with AI extracting and formatting the data for you to review). But alas making yet another tool isnt ideal.
Isn’t that a door (haha) opened by our supreme new AI coding overlords: that now it’s possible to take the Every Door source code (it’s on Github), and throw it into a coding agent with the instruction to „improve <ux shortcoming of your choice> without breaking functionality“, and with some iterations and human validation that yes, the UX is now indeed better, play the changes back with a PR?
Claude Design can help. Fable is pretty good at UI when you narrow down to a specific page or—better—something like a modal, table, etc.
If someone is a user, they'll have specific complaints. Claude Design is more than capable, which can then be fed directly into Claude Code to implement, test, iterate, and ship.
I agree that it lags behind coding and imo the highest leverage area for Anthropic to invest in. Hopefully they do so; UI is consistently one of the main (severe) differentiators between OSS and paid options.
“Make it nicer” will lead to unpredictable and controversial changes, likely to clash with the project owner’s vision. The owner would be better off using the LLM as a collaborator, if anything, to decide where to take the design.
However, UX can also be improved by some simple heuristics that could be seen as mechanistic by the standards of modern LLMs.
Performance and responsiveness, for example, contribute to UX even when the UI remains fixed. I’d wager Fable-level LLMs could improve perf on most open-source GUIs by benchmarking typical use cases and progressively applying standard tricks like caching, buffering, batching network calls.
No but if you have specific asks like “make this resizable” “I should be able to drag and drop to combine” or “add a button on the top right to close” it’s quite good at directed changes
I can improve the UI to my taste but if the maintainer doesn't have time/money to maintain a big ol vibe coded PR for some very opinionated change isn't going to do much.
That would appear to leave me with the choice of just using it for myself (lame) or I then have a public fork to maintain :(
If there's basically no shot of it getting up streamed I think I'd rather make something from scratch to suit my needs without the extras.
Anyway, I hope the AI overlords help us fund more maintainers soon!
I keep my neovim config maintained by a LLM which is a fork of Kickstart.
My example might be an outlier on the easy side because they have a custom/plugins directory that will not have merge conflicts ever so I try to never modify the main init.lua and keep all of my changes separate in my own files. This prevents merge conflicts.
I can then ask my LLM to add a plugin or customize existing plugins by writing files in this separate directory to add/overwrite plugins and configurations. This works great for me.
If I were working in the main file creating merge conflicts, I could imagine it could get messy fast.
In a lot of areas the sidewalks and crosswalks aren't mapped even though they show up clearly on overhead imagery. I try to fill them in when I can, although this should probably be an AI task now.
It doesn't help that there are multiple ways to map sidewalks in OSM (as a property of the roads themselves, or as standalone paths parallel to the roads).
I got pretty into OSM for a while and that's definitely the thing that eventually put me off... So much stuff has multiple ways to be mapped, and it gets confusing/overwhelming. I understand that OSM has a very malleable data model, and that definitely has many benefits, especially for niche/edge cases. But I do wish the community had arrived at a settled convention for at least the most basic stuff, like the aforementioned sidewalks.
At least in urban areas I've seen it's almost always better to define the sidewalks separately. The routing for pedestrians is often significantly different than for vehicles. This matters when the data is fed into Strava or Garmin for running routes.
I highly suspect Apple and Google maps are auto tracing satellite images. Apple maps has perfect coverage of every road marking on their maps that exactly lines up to the satellite images.
I believe most consumers of OSM just discard data like buildings and crosswalks and layer on top auto traced data which has 100% coverage.
This seems to be a very powerful way to contribute to OpenStreetMap, but I'm not sure if it's the right option for a new user.
I have over 2k contributions and most are from the Every Door app ( https://every-door.app/ ) on my phone.
If adding new data is too "scary", then maybe use StreetComplete ( https://streetcomplete.app/ ) which essentially asks questions about missing or existing old data.
I've added buildings, fixed layouts, etc, but that came later, after I better understood how things work.
I mainly chose JOSM for this tutorial because of its filter. As a beginner (just a few weeks ago), I couldn't figure out how to use iD's filter to show JOSM's equivalent of `name=* ((amenity=* "addr:housenumber"=*) | shop=*) -website=* -"contact:website"=*`. For this tutorial I wanted something better than than "click around the map until you find a place without a website." That felt like it'd be a frustrating and inefficient first experience.
I think your tutorial would have more impact if you had a super short intro making a quick mod using the web page. The existing stuff is excellent for those who get a surge of dopamine from updating the map and want more power and control. The web editor is far from ideal but the app has a greater learning curve. Even installing it can be onerous.
I used the web editor recently to add a street and path and to fix some names. It was about as clunky as the Google Maps web editor which I used for the same updates.
I wish Streetcomplete had an ios app. The ios editors are all far too cluttered and hard to use on mobile. I've almost been considering making my own editor like streetcomplete but as a web app so it's cross platform.
There's something a bit weird about OSM.
We have the infrastructure and the idea to have a wikipedia-like map. It's insanely cool.
But it's super hard to make any edit except through StreetComplete and people get asked the type of bushes they see in their street. I think the biggest priority would be to map all stores, their type and their opening hours. Right now there's nothing more reliable than Google Maps for this which forces people to use the Google Places API if they want a reliable product.
I think we should have an app somewhere that is more user-friendly and focused on what most people need from a business perspective.
JOSM is great when you get really into, but if it's really your first edit, just use the editor on openstreetmap.org.
If it's something you end up enjoying, one really satisfying thing to do is pick a small rural town and improve the map. With a few hours, it's not hard to make the OSM data more detailed and better than any other publicly available map.
After you create an OSM account, there is also https://maproulette.org, which has tons of little tasks to fix, grouped into challenges, and many of them can be done using just the aerial photos, from the comfort of your seat.
Then there is also mapping for humanitarian purposes, https://tasks.hotosm.org/, which has mapping projects prepared by disaster response teams, and you can help by updating maps of areas recently affected by disasters. E.g. recently there was a lot of mapping in the area hit by the August river flood in Nepal.
I recently purchased some very rural land with a cabin that I put on AirBnB. The address is a different road than the driveway is and all the maps took drivers around 1 mile away with no way to find the actual driveway. I had to go through the process of fixing this on Google, Apple, and open street maps. OSM was by far the easiest and my updates propagated within minutes. Google was the second easiest but still took me deep into the “feedback” menu and then a week or two of waiting. Apple was by far the worst as I had to sign up for an Apple business account, upload incorporation docs, and then go through multiple rounds of back and forth with some approval agent.
Another option for apple would have been to just wait for a few months. They are downstream of osm but updates are slow. Likely your "propagated within minutes" was misleading. Almost no app, certainly not a mainstream app your customers might use, is reading osm live. They're all days to months behind on periodic batch updates.
Months behind is not fair. Apps like Komoot, OSMAnd or CoMaps have monthly refresh cycles. Others are shorter and yes there are longer (mostly obscure) update cycles such as apple maps, Uber, https://transportnsw.info/
I don't know what the heck map data Uber uses, but it always sends cars to a road behind my house which would require them to drive through a swamp and then up a heavily wooded hill to get here. OSM had the exact same issue, but I fixed it a couple years ago and it propagated just fine to the various OSM nav apps a long time ago. Neither Google nor Apple maps ever had the issue. But now DoorDash, which never before had an issue, last night attempted to send the driver up a gas line easement to get here. No idea what that's about. The entire issue appears to be that I'm on a long shared driveway and the various nav systems are afraid of it.
In my experience, the bigger the app, the longer the update cycle. They likely have a QA and integration process to deal with how osm combines with other sources. Something like osmand is basically just an osm wrapper, so they can be fast.
The online iD editor is powerful enough for even pretty complex/big edits in my experience, with good basemap options and intuitive controls. I don’t see any need to download JOSM.
Exactly my thoughts. Advising to download and use JOSM to a novice OSM mapper to make their first edit there (to add a single tag, of all things) instead of iD is nonsense to me, just totally unnecessary overkill. I don’t even understand how article author decided it’s a good idea, to be honest.
JOSM aside, I think it's great to target people that read HN with this article. They are likely tech savvy and as much as OSM tries to make it easy for less tech savvy folks to contribute, it's just not really feasible without third party apps like StreetComplete. I recently tried to teach my dad, who was interested but completely overwhelmed, even by the iD editor, and the whole idea of the data model. Which is a shame because he knows so much about the area where he lives.
The limit is imposed by the OSM API itself, and it's a matter of how much data is already mapped in the area you're requesting -- a max of 50,000 nodes according the API docs. Of course data density varies wildly across the planet, so you can expect to fetch a lot more acreage in rural areas than in urban ones. But there's no way to know if a particular bounding box call will succeed without trying it out.
Editing software could be generally aware of high and low density locales and advise accordingly. And it could subdivide a large request into smaller ones. But the JOSM developers prefer to offer a closer-to-the-API experience.
As a beginner use the editor built in on the website instead (called ID). JOSM is a great power user tool, but this article's recommendation to use it for your first edit is misguided.
I appreciate this a lot, but I wonder why the first edit is not done on the website itself. This is 15 minutes of work for a single change, while on the website you can do it in a minute.
I've made a bunch of edits just through the website, because my rural village was not very accurately reflected on OSM. I've added all the missing footpaths, fixed a couple of intersections, and added building footprints for all the houses.
I'm not sure anyone but me cares, since most people use Google maps. But it's satisfying to have accurate maps for myself at any rate.
I started contributing via StreetComplete a couple of months ago, and then using iD, it's amazing this kind of thing can exist and work, just like Wikipedia.
Now I'm looking into automated edits, because in my region there's a lot of open data published by the government/local cities about locations of various types of features, like bicycle holders or bus stops, and it would be nice to keep that updated automatically.
I've been using the app "StreetComplete" on Android, I have found it to be a really seamless and easy way to add extra details to OpenStreetMap while roaming around.
Contributing to OSM was super cool. I've had an issue where my home snaps to the nearest road, which is in fact fenced off from us, rather than the road that our cul de sac connects to (which was not well marked in OSM). Last week, I went in and in about ten minutes used the visual editor to paint in the driveway, read a quick wiki page on how to correctly label driveways, and then submitted it. I got a pleasant jump scare the next time I doordashed some food and saw the little driveway squiggles I added on the map in the doordash app, and then again for lyft -- such a cool feeling!
Would highly recommend the web editor -- what's proposed here looks super comprehensive but way more difficult to use for a first timer.
One thing to note: OSM edits are associated with your account. Do not use your regular user name, or people can easily identify where you live since people tends to edit nearby locations.
If you accidentally did that, I believe there's a way for the admin to scrub that for you.
I'm not too concerned about my place of residence, since the state already publishes my full address online. But OSM edit history also shows the various places you visit, with timestamps too. I still haven't decided if I want to do something about that or not. It's certainly something new contributors should be aware of.
How does OSM prevent trolling or vandalism? Since many (most) courier companies rely on OSM for their database a bad "joke" could prove very frustrating to many people.
Others have gotten into how OSM fights vandalism, but I can tell you a little about what it is like to consume the data. About a decade ago I was in the public sector and we wanted to switch from google maps to OSM in our route calculation tool for the Danish travel-to-work tax deduction (translated). Initially we didn't change how the app worked, so we paid some organisation for an api access which worked similar to how a google maps api work. After a year or so we eventually rebuild the engine to keep a local copy of OSM where we had our GIS team do incremental and reviewed updates.
This was not because of vandalism, but because of how hard it was to update OSM when you don't do it often and might not look trustworthy. In Danish cities we have a complicated relationship with cars, we don't want them, but we do want the people they bring. One of the obstacles we create is having a lot of one way streets, and when OSM gets an error on those... well... suddenly there is a lot of addresses you simply can't reach. I once updated one of these errors with a photo from the internet, and it was rejected after a few miniutes because I had used an image from the internet which is (was?) against the TOS. Unfortunately the company we bought the API from was not doing any form of validation, so we had a week where our 5000 employess couldn't registerer driving to the most commonly used adress in the neighbouring city. I posted all sorts of documentation proving my official function, and had a discussion with the admins and even though they agreed I was right they refused to let me correct the mistake without real evidence. So eventually I drove my bicycle the 50km to the location, took some pictures and a couple with silly hats and submitted them and got my correction.
Once we had a local copy of the danish map we had no issues. I assume you would do this for any app relying on working routing data.
Just like Wikipedia, people follow changes. If there is vandalism, it often gets reverted within a few hours. If there's a mistake (relation broken for example) it can take a few hours longer to fix.
I once encountered a joke building that was so large, I remember in the magnitude of 500km2, that you couldn’t edit it in the web editor. You had to download a desktop application to delete it.
It was in a place of the world that is unlikely to be popular within the OSM community.
Fortunately it's fairly easy to query the database for that kind of thing and a few editors periodically go through the most implausibly-sized common features, so anything too egregious will get noticed eventually.
The last time I saw a collection of "biggest objects" for various tags it was mostly things that were just subtly mistagged (e.g., an entire forest being tagged as a single tree) rather than vandalism.
Funny enough, Cafe Lolo, the business that the example edit demonstrates, replaced my favorite restaurant in Seattle, Cookweaver. The chef-owner of Cookweaver is now doing private events and in-home meals for folks who miss his cooking: https://www.cookweaver.com/omakase-menu
I was put off by co tributing to osm at first when someone brought up that 300mb java monster application at first actually. Luckily i found there's an online editor and did my first edits there. I would definitely not recommend josm for a newcommer
I use the Street Complete app, which shows missing data around me. It's fun and satisfying to add many details that no other map has, like accessibility of crosswalks or street lighting.
I think the complaint is focused on the notion that the instructions tell a would-be contributor what is not OK, and then do not help them to figure out what is OK.
> Determine if any of the search results represent the official website for your place. Do NOT use search results for social media profiles, review sites, or other business aggregators. When in doubt, don’t use it.
This zero-option style of phrasing doesn't leave any room for interpretation.
It's a dumb thing to do too. If you have a website, you control what it says. For a shop or restaurant it's totally fine to just show a nice photo with your name, opening hours, address, and contact details, and just link to whatever social media accounts and reservation/delivery ordering platform you use.
It's also the place that will allow you to inform your patrons when big tech deletes your heavily invested in social media account for some reason.
Not having a normal website means that potential customers who search for you get hit by login-walls for Instagram and Facebook if they're not on it, or 'you need an app for this' with crap like TikTok. It also makes my (volunteer) job of mapping the area around me harder, because I'm most certainly not going to bother to enter any additional info about your business if I have to go to Instagram or Facebook (and in the OpenStreetMap community I'm not alone in that).
A lot of people today, particularly young people, no longer use the open web in a browser. They only use the social-media walled gardens through phone apps. Even for some newspapers etc. that might have existed first as websites, they use instead the official phone apps. So, a restaurant making its own website is not as important in 2026 as you think.
I think it's a very sad state of affairs, but I find even myself trusting the Facebook page more than the actual website for many places, since you can see the latest updates on Facebook (and how recent they are), while the website could be completely outdated with no way to tell it.
My experience is most restaurant websites are either outdated, offline, or hacked and showing some malware page. While the social media page is up to date.
While all of then problems you list are real, small restaurant owners don’t have the time or skills to run a website, having a social media and listing on the maps apps is enough.
I agree. If a business decided to only be on Facebook or Instagram, then they're choosing the path of hiding themselves from the open web. I wouldn't even bother to update their info on OSM.
(The double exclamation marks in the name drove me away initially, so I tried 3 others first, none of which worked well on the iPhone for my edits, but then "Go Map!!" seemed to just work.)
For edits that can be done from desktop, the OSM official Web site's editor was pretty good -- complicated, but seems to work, and has a nice interactive tutorial mode.
I hope the author reconsiders recommending JOSM to beginners. iD, StreetComplete, MapComplete…almost anything except JOSM would have been a better starting point.
So, I read the article, downloaded JOSM and start making edits on my neighborhood (including adding new poligons, buildings, etc).
Soon I thought "This would be easily done by an AI" and searched for it and found META's Rapid (https://rapideditor.org/) which does an ok job finding buildings, but really could go further and suggest the tags as well.
Automated building tracing is okay sometimes, but actively harmful other times. I know that at least in my region, Rapid footprints are all meters offset from the real location, because when they were building their dataset they weren't checking the satellite imagery offset.
In general it's probably better to see if you can find an official map, and check if its license terms are compatible[1] with OSM.
I am a long-time OSM contributor and I will just point out that much of the OSM mapping community have very strong opinions on automated/AI mapping. I mostly stay out of those discussions but be aware that automated edits will likely get reverted if you aren't very careful to follow the guidelines. No idea if Rapid enforces "proper" AI mapping or not.
it's much easier than that. just go on osm.org, create account, click edit and then ... DONT edit ... but complete the tutorial offered right there ... then edit. anyway, it's fun to keep the neighbourhood up-to-date.
Is there any software that can take raw footage from 360deg cameras that are now sprolling, identify businesses without websites, opening hours etc, and pre-fill them? With the user only having to validate.
https://alltheplaces.xyz/ is a better version of this idea - grabs snapshots of structured data where the business has made an effort to publish it.
Street view imagery is better for attributes on the actual street - mapillary did it first, with automated feature extraction for street signs etc, others have followed.
You can actually add a "streetview" level to the editor by adding the mapillary plugin and you can add material for others on the free and independent version: https://panoramax.fr/
I do not recommend JOSM to a new user. The iD editor in openstreetmap.org is much more user friendly than JOSM. The target audience for JOSM is power-users and experienced mappers.
I'm conflicted about OSM. Historically maps have essentially had a military use. Volunteering to give otherwise unattainable level of detail about a potential future war zone, is not right. Some details should be kept away from maps. That's what I read in TAZ by Hakim Bey
Most likely the parent was relating this to revealing where you live and the privacy aspects.
Yes indeed one could figure out where I went for holidays by my OSM edits but then any FAAG or similar would know that already by any social media interaction I might have had during the holidays.
My bigger OSM edits are rarely during the actual holidays but rather before or after.
> The name of the lake became politically contentious in August 2026, especially on maps. As OSM is not a consumer-facing product per se, the OpenStreetMap Foundation's longstanding policy regarding geopolitical disputes is to prioritize the on the ground rule by default but also record information about notable alternative claims, so that data consumers such as renderers and geocoders can choose what to present to end users.
> As of September 2026, the Lake Ontario relation has tags indicating its many names, most notably:
(linked page has nicer table)
> name Common name in the local language Lake Ontario English is the most commonly spoken language in both the US and Canada.
> name:en Common name in English globally Lake Ontario This name remains overwhelmingly popular both in the U.S. and abroad and so far continues to be used by most news and print media.
> name:fr Common name in French globally Lac Ontario Traditional name (in the other official language of Canada).
> official_name:en-US English name preferred by U.S. federal government agencies Lake America Official U.S. federal government position per GNIS and GNS, as ordered in Executive Order 14422. The order is only binding on the U.S. federal government, but the name is very unpopular according to opinion polling, particularly in local areas bordering the lake, and so far rarely used in news or print media.
I started contributing to OSM recently after a bike trail was built near me. The arial imagery typically takes years to refresh around here so I walked it a few times to capture GPX tracks and then drew the new path. It was exciting to see my contribution percolate out to various apps that depend on OSM, and meanwhile Google and Apple have both ignored my edit suggestions and deny the path exists.
So I have a fairly fresh newcomer's perspective and here's what I suggest to get started: keep it simple and start local. As others have noted, skip the complex mapping app and go straight to the website for feature edits, or download a simple mobile app like Every Door and focus on businesses and landmarks near you. Go on a walk around your neighborhood and look for old/incorrect/missing businesses. There may be errors near you about places you actually care about, and it is really gratifying to fix those.
There were restaurants near me that were missing, shops that had changed hands, etc., that were easy fixes but years overdue. I captured some basics (names, posted hours, the phone number posted on the door, etc.) with Every Door, and then later logged into the main OSM website and fine-tuned the entries. I got into a pattern of fixing one or two entries every evening when I went out for a walk and pretty soon my walking route was all up-to-date. Then I started paying attention to things like stop signs and cross walks and found a whole new kind of little, incremental edits that nobody else was doing.
It's been fun, I've made useful contributions, and my laptop is still Java free.
Every Door is definitely one of the easier ones and I like it but dang I wish the dev could get more funding to make it a nicer UX. Between the glitchy raster tiles and need to click load data all the time I feel it gets tiring fast.
I've considered building a separate app that's similar but oriented around the idea of using voice of pictures to update things (with AI extracting and formatting the data for you to review). But alas making yet another tool isnt ideal.
Isn’t that a door (haha) opened by our supreme new AI coding overlords: that now it’s possible to take the Every Door source code (it’s on Github), and throw it into a coding agent with the instruction to „improve <ux shortcoming of your choice> without breaking functionality“, and with some iterations and human validation that yes, the UX is now indeed better, play the changes back with a PR?
UX is one of the things AI isn’t good at. You can ask it for specific changes but just “make it nicer” is unlikely to work.
Claude Design can help. Fable is pretty good at UI when you narrow down to a specific page or—better—something like a modal, table, etc.
If someone is a user, they'll have specific complaints. Claude Design is more than capable, which can then be fed directly into Claude Code to implement, test, iterate, and ship.
I agree that it lags behind coding and imo the highest leverage area for Anthropic to invest in. Hopefully they do so; UI is consistently one of the main (severe) differentiators between OSS and paid options.
“Make it nicer” will lead to unpredictable and controversial changes, likely to clash with the project owner’s vision. The owner would be better off using the LLM as a collaborator, if anything, to decide where to take the design.
However, UX can also be improved by some simple heuristics that could be seen as mechanistic by the standards of modern LLMs.
Performance and responsiveness, for example, contribute to UX even when the UI remains fixed. I’d wager Fable-level LLMs could improve perf on most open-source GUIs by benchmarking typical use cases and progressively applying standard tricks like caching, buffering, batching network calls.
That's real work and requires real skill. The parent comment example prompt just doesn't work.
No but if you have specific asks like “make this resizable” “I should be able to drag and drop to combine” or “add a button on the top right to close” it’s quite good at directed changes
I can improve the UI to my taste but if the maintainer doesn't have time/money to maintain a big ol vibe coded PR for some very opinionated change isn't going to do much.
That would appear to leave me with the choice of just using it for myself (lame) or I then have a public fork to maintain :(
If there's basically no shot of it getting up streamed I think I'd rather make something from scratch to suit my needs without the extras.
Anyway, I hope the AI overlords help us fund more maintainers soon!
FYI LLMs are also very good at maintaining a fork ;)
Do you have any examples of forks maintained by LLMs and how they do it?
I keep my neovim config maintained by a LLM which is a fork of Kickstart.
My example might be an outlier on the easy side because they have a custom/plugins directory that will not have merge conflicts ever so I try to never modify the main init.lua and keep all of my changes separate in my own files. This prevents merge conflicts.
I can then ask my LLM to add a plugin or customize existing plugins by writing files in this separate directory to add/overwrite plugins and configurations. This works great for me.
If I were working in the main file creating merge conflicts, I could imagine it could get messy fast.
StreetComplete as well !
In a lot of areas the sidewalks and crosswalks aren't mapped even though they show up clearly on overhead imagery. I try to fill them in when I can, although this should probably be an AI task now.
It doesn't help that there are multiple ways to map sidewalks in OSM (as a property of the roads themselves, or as standalone paths parallel to the roads).
I got pretty into OSM for a while and that's definitely the thing that eventually put me off... So much stuff has multiple ways to be mapped, and it gets confusing/overwhelming. I understand that OSM has a very malleable data model, and that definitely has many benefits, especially for niche/edge cases. But I do wish the community had arrived at a settled convention for at least the most basic stuff, like the aforementioned sidewalks.
There's usually a reasonably clear consensus within a region or country.
That's less true for niche stuff (vs stuff where two different ideas are in wide use), but there probably isn't all that much of it either.
One way to approach it is to not worry too much about it, consistency can come later.
That's true, but the very feeling that I might be inputting things in a way that might have to be updated later kinda drained my motivation.
I do understand that even if does get replaced eventually, it still was useful for a while, and probably served as the basis for whatever came after.
But still. For whatever reason, in my brain, it just diminished whatever psychological reward I got from adding information to OSM, which is a shame.
At least in urban areas I've seen it's almost always better to define the sidewalks separately. The routing for pedestrians is often significantly different than for vehicles. This matters when the data is fed into Strava or Garmin for running routes.
I highly suspect Apple and Google maps are auto tracing satellite images. Apple maps has perfect coverage of every road marking on their maps that exactly lines up to the satellite images.
I believe most consumers of OSM just discard data like buildings and crosswalks and layer on top auto traced data which has 100% coverage.
One of the weaknesses of OSM is not requiring consumers to contribute back data like that.
Every Door is pretty cool but for iOS I prefer GoMaps more.
This seems to be a very powerful way to contribute to OpenStreetMap, but I'm not sure if it's the right option for a new user.
I have over 2k contributions and most are from the Every Door app ( https://every-door.app/ ) on my phone.
If adding new data is too "scary", then maybe use StreetComplete ( https://streetcomplete.app/ ) which essentially asks questions about missing or existing old data.
I've added buildings, fixed layouts, etc, but that came later, after I better understood how things work.
I've taken StreetComplete with me on walks around my neighborhood and on a few vacations. It was really easy to submit data for missing items.
I did my first contributions last week with it. Really easy and the UI is simple and nice.
Oh dear.
Using JOSM for your 1st edit is definitely not recommended.
Doing the same with iD (the editor embedded in the OSM website) is faster and there's even a tutorial that will explain a bit about how things work.
That's a fair point.
I mainly chose JOSM for this tutorial because of its filter. As a beginner (just a few weeks ago), I couldn't figure out how to use iD's filter to show JOSM's equivalent of `name=* ((amenity=* "addr:housenumber"=*) | shop=*) -website=* -"contact:website"=*`. For this tutorial I wanted something better than than "click around the map until you find a place without a website." That felt like it'd be a frustrating and inefficient first experience.
Is there a way to make that filter in iD?
I think your tutorial would have more impact if you had a super short intro making a quick mod using the web page. The existing stuff is excellent for those who get a surge of dopamine from updating the map and want more power and control. The web editor is far from ideal but the app has a greater learning curve. Even installing it can be onerous.
I used the web editor recently to add a street and path and to fix some names. It was about as clunky as the Google Maps web editor which I used for the same updates.
Yeah, I got as far as "Search for an Official Website". Didn't know what the hell I was looking at or for, and uninstalled JOSM.
Tried to run JOSM, it tells me that "This app cannot run on this machine you have macOS 10.14.6 and it requires 10.11".
Just use the web page. It works, it's not hard to use and it's immediate when you have the urge and motivation to fix something on a map.
https://streetcomplete.app - basic task-based, on-the-ground, app for Android
https://every-door.app - intermediate on-the-ground app for smartphones
https://rapideditor.org - AI-assisted mapping in browser
https://www.hotosm.org - task-based mapping in browser
https://josm.openstreetmap.de - advanced editor for desktop (this post)
https://www.comaps.app - actually use the map with ability to make minor changes
I wish Streetcomplete had an ios app. The ios editors are all far too cluttered and hard to use on mobile. I've almost been considering making my own editor like streetcomplete but as a web app so it's cross platform.
There's progress being made on an iOS app for StreetComplete.
https://github.com/streetcomplete/StreetComplete/issues/5421
Oh that's awesome, Looks like I'll just wait and see then.
Are you aware of https://mapcomplete.org/ ? Web-based and thematically focused.
One of the great things about StreetComplete is that it works perfectly offline.
There's something a bit weird about OSM. We have the infrastructure and the idea to have a wikipedia-like map. It's insanely cool. But it's super hard to make any edit except through StreetComplete and people get asked the type of bushes they see in their street. I think the biggest priority would be to map all stores, their type and their opening hours. Right now there's nothing more reliable than Google Maps for this which forces people to use the Google Places API if they want a reliable product. I think we should have an app somewhere that is more user-friendly and focused on what most people need from a business perspective.
You can change the type of "mission" you get on street complete, but it definitely needs more sensible defaults.
Every door is more focused towards opening hours. Streetcomplete is indeed alot of 'what type of road is this?'
StreetComplete also asks about opening hours, but you need to have a POI added first (AFAIR StreetComplete allows adding POIs also)
> AFAIR StreetComplete allows adding POIs also
yes. Click on left circle in top-right, select orange icon ("Places" layer)
JOSM is great when you get really into, but if it's really your first edit, just use the editor on openstreetmap.org.
If it's something you end up enjoying, one really satisfying thing to do is pick a small rural town and improve the map. With a few hours, it's not hard to make the OSM data more detailed and better than any other publicly available map.
We added a simple place editor to https://cartes.app that includes the website attribute.
We're convinced most users (shopowners too) want to read and write in the same app.
After you create an OSM account, there is also https://maproulette.org, which has tons of little tasks to fix, grouped into challenges, and many of them can be done using just the aerial photos, from the comfort of your seat.
Then there is also mapping for humanitarian purposes, https://tasks.hotosm.org/, which has mapping projects prepared by disaster response teams, and you can help by updating maps of areas recently affected by disasters. E.g. recently there was a lot of mapping in the area hit by the August river flood in Nepal.
I recently purchased some very rural land with a cabin that I put on AirBnB. The address is a different road than the driveway is and all the maps took drivers around 1 mile away with no way to find the actual driveway. I had to go through the process of fixing this on Google, Apple, and open street maps. OSM was by far the easiest and my updates propagated within minutes. Google was the second easiest but still took me deep into the “feedback” menu and then a week or two of waiting. Apple was by far the worst as I had to sign up for an Apple business account, upload incorporation docs, and then go through multiple rounds of back and forth with some approval agent.
Another option for apple would have been to just wait for a few months. They are downstream of osm but updates are slow. Likely your "propagated within minutes" was misleading. Almost no app, certainly not a mainstream app your customers might use, is reading osm live. They're all days to months behind on periodic batch updates.
Months behind is not fair. Apps like Komoot, OSMAnd or CoMaps have monthly refresh cycles. Others are shorter and yes there are longer (mostly obscure) update cycles such as apple maps, Uber, https://transportnsw.info/
I don't know what the heck map data Uber uses, but it always sends cars to a road behind my house which would require them to drive through a swamp and then up a heavily wooded hill to get here. OSM had the exact same issue, but I fixed it a couple years ago and it propagated just fine to the various OSM nav apps a long time ago. Neither Google nor Apple maps ever had the issue. But now DoorDash, which never before had an issue, last night attempted to send the driver up a gas line easement to get here. No idea what that's about. The entire issue appears to be that I'm on a long shared driveway and the various nav systems are afraid of it.
In my experience, the bigger the app, the longer the update cycle. They likely have a QA and integration process to deal with how osm combines with other sources. Something like osmand is basically just an osm wrapper, so they can be fast.
I think bigger apps are also slowing down updates to prevent vandalism from appearing to a wide number of users.
The online iD editor is powerful enough for even pretty complex/big edits in my experience, with good basemap options and intuitive controls. I don’t see any need to download JOSM.
Exactly my thoughts. Advising to download and use JOSM to a novice OSM mapper to make their first edit there (to add a single tag, of all things) instead of iD is nonsense to me, just totally unnecessary overkill. I don’t even understand how article author decided it’s a good idea, to be honest.
JOSM aside, I think it's great to target people that read HN with this article. They are likely tech savvy and as much as OSM tries to make it easy for less tech savvy folks to contribute, it's just not really feasible without third party apps like StreetComplete. I recently tried to teach my dad, who was interested but completely overwhelmed, even by the iD editor, and the whole idea of the data model. Which is a shame because he knows so much about the area where he lives.
Boy, the UX is horrible!
> The area you tried to downlaod is too big or your request was too large.
And no indication whatsoever of how big the area should be, I'm at my fifth attempt so far.
The limit is imposed by the OSM API itself, and it's a matter of how much data is already mapped in the area you're requesting -- a max of 50,000 nodes according the API docs. Of course data density varies wildly across the planet, so you can expect to fetch a lot more acreage in rural areas than in urban ones. But there's no way to know if a particular bounding box call will succeed without trying it out.
Editing software could be generally aware of high and low density locales and advise accordingly. And it could subdivide a large request into smaller ones. But the JOSM developers prefer to offer a closer-to-the-API experience.
[0] https://wiki.openstreetmap.org/wiki/API_v0.6#Retrieving_map_...
As a beginner use the editor built in on the website instead (called ID). JOSM is a great power user tool, but this article's recommendation to use it for your first edit is misguided.
It's actually OK compared to your typical GIS desktop app, but naturally not the thing to recommend a beginner.
Sorry you're having such a frustrating first experience. I'd recommend trying just 1-3 city blocks max
I appreciate this a lot, but I wonder why the first edit is not done on the website itself. This is 15 minutes of work for a single change, while on the website you can do it in a minute.
I've made a bunch of edits just through the website, because my rural village was not very accurately reflected on OSM. I've added all the missing footpaths, fixed a couple of intersections, and added building footprints for all the houses.
I'm not sure anyone but me cares, since most people use Google maps. But it's satisfying to have accurate maps for myself at any rate.
I started contributing via StreetComplete a couple of months ago, and then using iD, it's amazing this kind of thing can exist and work, just like Wikipedia.
Now I'm looking into automated edits, because in my region there's a lot of open data published by the government/local cities about locations of various types of features, like bicycle holders or bus stops, and it would be nice to keep that updated automatically.
I've been using the app "StreetComplete" on Android, I have found it to be a really seamless and easy way to add extra details to OpenStreetMap while roaming around.
+1. https://streetcomplete.app/ is really easy to get into.
Contributing to OSM was super cool. I've had an issue where my home snaps to the nearest road, which is in fact fenced off from us, rather than the road that our cul de sac connects to (which was not well marked in OSM). Last week, I went in and in about ten minutes used the visual editor to paint in the driveway, read a quick wiki page on how to correctly label driveways, and then submitted it. I got a pleasant jump scare the next time I doordashed some food and saw the little driveway squiggles I added on the map in the doordash app, and then again for lyft -- such a cool feeling!
Would highly recommend the web editor -- what's proposed here looks super comprehensive but way more difficult to use for a first timer.
One thing to note: OSM edits are associated with your account. Do not use your regular user name, or people can easily identify where you live since people tends to edit nearby locations.
If you accidentally did that, I believe there's a way for the admin to scrub that for you.
I'm not too concerned about my place of residence, since the state already publishes my full address online. But OSM edit history also shows the various places you visit, with timestamps too. I still haven't decided if I want to do something about that or not. It's certainly something new contributors should be aware of.
There are much easier ways to identify the approximate neighborhood where most people live.
You can define a location of your choice in your profile for example.
How does OSM prevent trolling or vandalism? Since many (most) courier companies rely on OSM for their database a bad "joke" could prove very frustrating to many people.
Others have gotten into how OSM fights vandalism, but I can tell you a little about what it is like to consume the data. About a decade ago I was in the public sector and we wanted to switch from google maps to OSM in our route calculation tool for the Danish travel-to-work tax deduction (translated). Initially we didn't change how the app worked, so we paid some organisation for an api access which worked similar to how a google maps api work. After a year or so we eventually rebuild the engine to keep a local copy of OSM where we had our GIS team do incremental and reviewed updates.
This was not because of vandalism, but because of how hard it was to update OSM when you don't do it often and might not look trustworthy. In Danish cities we have a complicated relationship with cars, we don't want them, but we do want the people they bring. One of the obstacles we create is having a lot of one way streets, and when OSM gets an error on those... well... suddenly there is a lot of addresses you simply can't reach. I once updated one of these errors with a photo from the internet, and it was rejected after a few miniutes because I had used an image from the internet which is (was?) against the TOS. Unfortunately the company we bought the API from was not doing any form of validation, so we had a week where our 5000 employess couldn't registerer driving to the most commonly used adress in the neighbouring city. I posted all sorts of documentation proving my official function, and had a discussion with the admins and even though they agreed I was right they refused to let me correct the mistake without real evidence. So eventually I drove my bicycle the 50km to the location, took some pictures and a couple with silly hats and submitted them and got my correction.
Once we had a local copy of the danish map we had no issues. I assume you would do this for any app relying on working routing data.
Just like Wikipedia, people follow changes. If there is vandalism, it often gets reverted within a few hours. If there's a mistake (relation broken for example) it can take a few hours longer to fix.
I once encountered a joke building that was so large, I remember in the magnitude of 500km2, that you couldn’t edit it in the web editor. You had to download a desktop application to delete it.
It was in a place of the world that is unlikely to be popular within the OSM community.
Fortunately it's fairly easy to query the database for that kind of thing and a few editors periodically go through the most implausibly-sized common features, so anything too egregious will get noticed eventually.
The last time I saw a collection of "biggest objects" for various tags it was mostly things that were just subtly mistagged (e.g., an entire forest being tagged as a single tree) rather than vandalism.
> e.g., an entire forest being tagged as a single tree
If that forest's dominant tree happens to be a quaking aspen then technically speaking it might not have been mistagged.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Pando_(tree)
The main method of prevention is blocks on users that make malicious edits. Obviously that doesn't prevent all malicious edits.
The larger users of the data are doing some degree of validation of changes before showing them to users.
Funny enough, Cafe Lolo, the business that the example edit demonstrates, replaced my favorite restaurant in Seattle, Cookweaver. The chef-owner of Cookweaver is now doing private events and in-home meals for folks who miss his cooking: https://www.cookweaver.com/omakase-menu
I was put off by co tributing to osm at first when someone brought up that 300mb java monster application at first actually. Luckily i found there's an online editor and did my first edits there. I would definitely not recommend josm for a newcommer
I’d also recommend StreetComplete, which makes contributing to OSM as easy as playing Pokemon Go.
I use the Street Complete app, which shows missing data around me. It's fun and satisfying to add many details that no other map has, like accessibility of crosswalks or street lighting.
> Do NOT use search results for social media profiles
This seems a bit outdated as many restaurants/shops now consider they FB/insta page as their "official" website (or rather lack of).
For social media profiles, a different tag like contact:facebook, contact:instagram, etc. are recommended!
[1] https://taginfo.openstreetmap.org/keys/contact:facebook [2] https://taginfo.openstreetmap.org/keys/contact:instagram
I think the complaint is focused on the notion that the instructions tell a would-be contributor what is not OK, and then do not help them to figure out what is OK.
> Determine if any of the search results represent the official website for your place. Do NOT use search results for social media profiles, review sites, or other business aggregators. When in doubt, don’t use it.
This zero-option style of phrasing doesn't leave any room for interpretation.
Thanks, I feel the article should have said that
No problem- I'll clarify this in an edit later today. Thanks for the feedback!
It's a dumb thing to do too. If you have a website, you control what it says. For a shop or restaurant it's totally fine to just show a nice photo with your name, opening hours, address, and contact details, and just link to whatever social media accounts and reservation/delivery ordering platform you use.
It's also the place that will allow you to inform your patrons when big tech deletes your heavily invested in social media account for some reason.
Not having a normal website means that potential customers who search for you get hit by login-walls for Instagram and Facebook if they're not on it, or 'you need an app for this' with crap like TikTok. It also makes my (volunteer) job of mapping the area around me harder, because I'm most certainly not going to bother to enter any additional info about your business if I have to go to Instagram or Facebook (and in the OpenStreetMap community I'm not alone in that).
A lot of people today, particularly young people, no longer use the open web in a browser. They only use the social-media walled gardens through phone apps. Even for some newspapers etc. that might have existed first as websites, they use instead the official phone apps. So, a restaurant making its own website is not as important in 2026 as you think.
I think it's a very sad state of affairs, but I find even myself trusting the Facebook page more than the actual website for many places, since you can see the latest updates on Facebook (and how recent they are), while the website could be completely outdated with no way to tell it.
My experience is most restaurant websites are either outdated, offline, or hacked and showing some malware page. While the social media page is up to date.
While all of then problems you list are real, small restaurant owners don’t have the time or skills to run a website, having a social media and listing on the maps apps is enough.
I agree. If a business decided to only be on Facebook or Instagram, then they're choosing the path of hiding themselves from the open web. I wouldn't even bother to update their info on OSM.
There's separate tags for the social media profiles. So those can still be added.
On iPhone, so far "Go Map!!" works well for my simple edits, which are things I notice while walking on the sidewalk.
https://wiki.openstreetmap.org/wiki/Go_Map!!
(The double exclamation marks in the name drove me away initially, so I tried 3 others first, none of which worked well on the iPhone for my edits, but then "Go Map!!" seemed to just work.)
For edits that can be done from desktop, the OSM official Web site's editor was pretty good -- complicated, but seems to work, and has a nice interactive tutorial mode.
I hope the author reconsiders recommending JOSM to beginners. iD, StreetComplete, MapComplete…almost anything except JOSM would have been a better starting point.
Downloading a whole binary to do an easy edit in ID editor
Crazy stuff, definitely not for beginners
The article describes a case that is a perfect candidate to be automated by LM. You don’t have to have real-world knowledge for that.
Would be interesting to see what involves contributing a real thing that’s not found on the net - a fence, footpath, etc. Or contributing a bus stop.
No. If you're making maps and building a database of facts, I think the possibility of hallucinations is actively harmful.
> the Java OSM editor app
Java? No thanks. I don't want that monstrosity of system-hogging, clunk, slow, 1990's UIs on my system again.
I was just thinking about this as I just started using Overpass QL to help a friend with a project.
So, I read the article, downloaded JOSM and start making edits on my neighborhood (including adding new poligons, buildings, etc).
Soon I thought "This would be easily done by an AI" and searched for it and found META's Rapid (https://rapideditor.org/) which does an ok job finding buildings, but really could go further and suggest the tags as well.
Automated building tracing is okay sometimes, but actively harmful other times. I know that at least in my region, Rapid footprints are all meters offset from the real location, because when they were building their dataset they weren't checking the satellite imagery offset.
In general it's probably better to see if you can find an official map, and check if its license terms are compatible[1] with OSM.
[1] https://blog.openstreetmap.org/2017/03/17/use-of-cc-by-data/
I am a long-time OSM contributor and I will just point out that much of the OSM mapping community have very strong opinions on automated/AI mapping. I mostly stay out of those discussions but be aware that automated edits will likely get reverted if you aren't very careful to follow the guidelines. No idea if Rapid enforces "proper" AI mapping or not.
I would honestly not recommend beginners use JOSM - the web based iD editor [1] is much easier to learn and will hold your hand a lot more.
[1]: https://learnosm.org/en/beginner/id-editor/
As a side note, there is an Android app called StreetComplete [1] which creates 'quests' for you that let you contribute to OSM in a fun way.
[1] - https://streetcomplete.app/
Starting with a website tag is clever because it gives newcomers a bounded edit and leaves a source for later phone and hours updates.
Surely if they want any chance of having relatively up-to-date meta data on their map, making edits needs to be more user friendly than this.
Thank you so much for this tutorial, I've made my fist OSM updates. As a former gis guy, this is awesome!
it's much easier than that. just go on osm.org, create account, click edit and then ... DONT edit ... but complete the tutorial offered right there ... then edit. anyway, it's fun to keep the neighbourhood up-to-date.
Is there any software that can take raw footage from 360deg cameras that are now sprolling, identify businesses without websites, opening hours etc, and pre-fill them? With the user only having to validate.
A foot-carried google street car if you want.
https://alltheplaces.xyz/ is a better version of this idea - grabs snapshots of structured data where the business has made an effort to publish it.
Street view imagery is better for attributes on the actual street - mapillary did it first, with automated feature extraction for street signs etc, others have followed.
You can actually add a "streetview" level to the editor by adding the mapillary plugin and you can add material for others on the free and independent version: https://panoramax.fr/
mapillary got bought up by meta.
sprolling
?
I do not recommend JOSM to a new user. The iD editor in openstreetmap.org is much more user friendly than JOSM. The target audience for JOSM is power-users and experienced mappers.
I'm conflicted about OSM. Historically maps have essentially had a military use. Volunteering to give otherwise unattainable level of detail about a potential future war zone, is not right. Some details should be kept away from maps. That's what I read in TAZ by Hakim Bey
Don't make your first edit(s) around the place you live.
Any good reasons, why not do our first edits around the place you live ? Privacy issue ?
Most likely the parent was relating this to revealing where you live and the privacy aspects. Yes indeed one could figure out where I went for holidays by my OSM edits but then any FAAG or similar would know that already by any social media interaction I might have had during the holidays. My bigger OSM edits are rarely during the actual holidays but rather before or after.
w00t. L-U-V this
im using OSM in my app but its not clear how much usage i can get before i get rate limite ?
Why is lake America misspelled on there?
See https://wiki.openstreetmap.org/wiki/Lake_Ontario for OpenStreetMap documentation page on that topic.
> The name of the lake became politically contentious in August 2026, especially on maps. As OSM is not a consumer-facing product per se, the OpenStreetMap Foundation's longstanding policy regarding geopolitical disputes is to prioritize the on the ground rule by default but also record information about notable alternative claims, so that data consumers such as renderers and geocoders can choose what to present to end users.
> As of September 2026, the Lake Ontario relation has tags indicating its many names, most notably:
(linked page has nicer table)
> name Common name in the local language Lake Ontario English is the most commonly spoken language in both the US and Canada.
> name:en Common name in English globally Lake Ontario This name remains overwhelmingly popular both in the U.S. and abroad and so far continues to be used by most news and print media.
> name:fr Common name in French globally Lac Ontario Traditional name (in the other official language of Canada).
> official_name:en-US English name preferred by U.S. federal government agencies Lake America Official U.S. federal government position per GNIS and GNS, as ordered in Executive Order 14422. The order is only binding on the U.S. federal government, but the name is very unpopular according to opinion polling, particularly in local areas bordering the lake, and so far rarely used in news or print media.
I send update about defibrylitors and after half year still it not apear in map
sorry this is not profesional
1) is map style you looking at showing AED at all? No map style shows all OpenStreetMap data.
2) have you made edit or created a note? Many notes are waiting for years for volunteer to verify them