1

I want to download a map of large area (like a city) for some researches, in the .osm format. Methods in http://help.openstreetmap.org/questions/22/how-do-i-export-map-images-of-larger-areas seems useless for my problem because it can capture the small area in .osm format only. How can I do that?

asked 25 Apr '11, 14:04

crisp22140's gravatar image

crisp22140
21113
accept rate: 0%


2 Answers:
5

The Export tab on the main OSM site is not the appropriate way to export large areas: it uses too many resources from the API. I also think it is limited by constraints in the API interface itself: there is a maximum area and maximum amount of data which can be downloaded through the API map call.

Therefore you will need to use the available alternatives:

  • One of the XAPI instances. These are designed for providing read-only access to very recent snapshots of OSM data. Unfortunately, they are often overwhelmed by requests. The JAXPI instance run by MapQuest is probably the best one to use: it should certainly cope with downloading a city.
  • Using an already available download, such as those of Geofabrik and Cloudmade. These cover many (but not all) countries and most regions of the world. For places which are very actively mapped there may be extracts of smaller areas. In most cases you will still want to reduce the amount of data you use. To do this you should use Osmosis to read the extract file and extract a bounding box from it (osmosis --rx file="bla.osm" --bbox left=##.## right=##.## top=##.## bottom=##.## --wx file="extracted_city.osm", where the numeric values are the lat and lon of a bounding box)
permanent link

answered 25 Apr '11, 14:34

SK53's gravatar image

SK53 ♦
23.6k46238372
accept rate: 20%

1

You can use QGis to download large data. Vector->OpenStreetMap-> download data

permanent link

answered 19 Dec '16, 05:47

Man's gravatar image

Man
16
accept rate: 0%

This solution is very simple. Thank you Man for your answer.

(14 Mar '19, 23:35) BanAnanas

Is that still up to date? Was just searching for a solution, to download larger areas from OSM and found your answer. But when I go for Vector - there is not OpenStreetMap. Is there another way today or just not possible anymore?

(25 Feb, 12:50) sant0s_
1

Yes there is still a download option in QGIS, the QuickOSM plugin, which is an interface to Overpass which these days is the de facto answer to the question. In general it's probably better in this case to ask a new question as this one is rather old: it's rather easier to provide an up-to-date answer without having to explain why the accepted answers are no longer applicable.

(25 Feb, 15:43) SK53 ♦

Markdown Basics

  • *italic* or _italic_
  • **bold** or __bold__
  • link:[text](http://url.com/ "title")
  • image?![alt text](/path/img.jpg "title")
  • numbered list: 1. Foo 2. Bar
  • to add a line break simply add two spaces to where you would like the new line to be.
  • basic HTML tags are also supported

Question tags:

×175
×65
×10

question asked: 25 Apr '11, 14:04

question was seen: 17,053 times

last updated: 25 Feb, 15:43

powered by OSQA