Map Icons

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Map Icons - Other languages
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Map Icons (a.k.a. symbols or pictograms) are commonly used as a cartographic technique to represent different map features. Often icons are used to represent different POI types in more magnified maps, but icon graphics can also be used on areas or even linear features. The use of map icons, as with all other cartographic style choices, is under the control of developers/designers when they configure rendering software, and with OpenStreetMap you can experiment with this yourself! Many people use OpenStreetMap in this way, and so many icon sets have been designed (and often shared) by the community.

On this page we list various sets of icons. Of course every renderer and every generated map uses only a subset of the shared icon collections. Additionally each rendering will render something for only a subset of the tags found within OpenStreetMap data. It is a cartographic choice as to which tags should be rendered with an icon. See Map Features to see a big list of many tags in the OpenStreetMap data, but the data is not limited even to that list.

For graphic design tips please refer to /Map Icons Standards, /WikiProject Pictograms.

Renderer defaults

There are many sets of icons and rendering systems are hugely flexible in which icons are used, so it's perhaps unfortunate that people tend to be most interested in the icons used in the renderer defaults.

Standard tile layer (openstreetmap-carto)

openstreetmap-carto colours
name color
transport #0092da
food, money, some amenity #734a08
medical #da0092
shopping #ac39ac
tourism #0092da
small details, man_made #666666

The Standard tile layer appearing on openstreetmap.org is the default OSM rendering.

  • Files (SVG) are on GitHub
  • If you miss an icon you might open a new issue or look for suitable collections (see below).
  • For the design policy, see Github.

Osmarender

osmarender was a rendering system with default icons as follows. This is no longer available as a layer on openstreetmap.org due to the tiles@home system being shut down

design policy:

See also

Other OSM projects

See also

License

Icons designs are of course copyrightable creative works, but it's such a shame to introduce awkward niggling legal doubts, hampering the use of what is essentially a very basic element of a graphical map. As such it is sensible to release icon designs with a public domain or CC0 license. Some icon sets listed on this page are released as such. We should aim to state clearly where there are exceptions to this (but users may wish to double-check with the original artists)

Icon Software

Because .SVG vector graphics are preferred to generate different resolutions of an icon, it is recommended that icons be created with a tool such as Inkscape, OpenOffice Draw, or similar. To work with the exported .PNG image files, GIMP is recommended.

Matching Map Icons with Map Features

As the category and icon names don't match the OSM map features tags, you'll need to match a map feature with an icon:

The JOSM "ex mappaint" style has a wide range of mappings of OSM map features to the icons, see: elemstyles.xml - it's probably a very good idea that JOSM and other programs will show the same icons for the same map features.

To create a more "map features" like structure of the icons, you can call the script create_osm.sh. Based on an XSLT transformation of the above mentioned elemstyles.xml, this script creates a directory called osm. Then you'll have a set of directories named after the map features keys (e.g. highway) containing icons named after the values (e.g. stop.png). Please note:

  • the different icon themes will have a varying level of completeness of the OSM features, classic.small will have the most complete set of them
  • for the XSLT transformation, you'll need xsltproc from the libxslt package installed

Internal Icon collections

External Icon Resources

External Symbol Resources

Other Icon Tips

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