Limitations/User interface
This page attempts to document the biggest current limitations of the https://www.openstreetmap.org user interface.
For some other web maps that improve on some of these issues, please see Worldwide web maps#General maps.
Targeted at mappers not end users
While www.openstreetmap.org is the flagship website of OpenStreetMap the focus of the website has long been on mappers as opposed to on end users[1], and end-users still aren't a primary target audience[2] as evidenced by the following features not being supported: https://blog.openstreetmap.org/2023/01/04/reminder-call-for-feedback-on-the-data-model/
- finding point of interest by category
- One of the greatest things about OpenStreetMap are tags, openstreetmap.org however does not let you find e.g. nearby restaurants, cafes, or supermarkets.
- linked images aren't displayed
- E.g. images linked via wikimedia_commons=* aren't displayed.
- no satellite/aerial background layer
- Aerial imagery and satellite imagery with global coverage is available under restrictive terms. In the iD editor satellite backgrounds are however available, as it is more reasonable to use imagery covering only small part of the world, and some companies made their imagery usable for OSM editing only (for example Microsoft makes Bing imagery available in effort to undermine Google Maps).
- Properties of the selected objects are displayed as raw tags
- Keys are not translated into localized human-readable text, values such as opening hours aren't displayed in a user-friendly format, no grouping or visual structure
- You cannot click on points of interest.
- other map interfaces display popups with information such as opening data and postal addresses
- Limits on opinionated selection/curation of services
- Instead of picking, say, the best routing service for pedestrians, osm.org leaves this selection to the user by offering multiple choices
- ... ?
Raster tiles instead of vector tiles
Using raster tiles instead of vector tiles comes with several big drawbacks:
- Names cannot be easily localized to the user's preferred language.
- The style of the map cannot be easily customized.
The Operations Working Group is currently working on hosting vector tiles on OSMF servers.
Geocoding & search
The website use Nominatim as its geocoder.
- Nominatim doesn't support street intersections.[3]
- No autocompletion.
Large bounding boxes clutter the history view
This UI limitation even impacts the Automated Edits code of conduct:
If your bot creates one changeset for a bunch of changes covering the whole planet, that, too, becomes hard to read, and pollutes the history in places nowhere near the changes.
Super-relations aren't displayed
A super-relation is a relation consisting of other relations. www.openstreetmap.org unfortunately currently doesn't display them for performance reasons.[4]
So for example the relation for the EuroVelo 1 (2763798
2763798) doesn't display anything ... you have to click through the relations till you get to a non-super-relation but then you only get to see a small part of the super-relation.
While Overpass can display super-relations with e.g. (rel(2763798);>>;);out geom; it also struggles with large relations (attempting it with the EuroVelo 1 crashes my browser tab).
There doesn't appear to be a website that can efficiently display reasonably up-to-date versions of arbitrary OSM super-relations.
Most tags are not rendered
Only a small subset of tags is visible on the default map style. While adding new map styles is possible if they meet the guidelines, the current situation is that most tags are only supported in third-party renderings and applications which are not discoverable from the OSM website.