Talk:Slippy map

Technical Information

Is there any discription on how the slippy map works? It looks nice but I would like to have some more technical information. Is the map generated on the spot or rendered in some other way and cached? If so, how long does it take to see your updates? When will there be any results outside the UK, do we have to trigger this or will these parts be added later on? Thanks! -- Cimm 13 Nov 2006

It's generated by Mapnik. I believe the tiles are currently generated on Artem's machine, before being uploaded, but longer term Steve says they'll be done on the tile server. You need to process a planet.osm file into a spacial postgres database before mapnik can use it, so there'll always be a lag. I suspect you won't see much outside the UK until it has been transfered to running on tile. -- Gagravarr 11:56, 13 November 2006 (UTC)

I've tried to add some more description. Thinking in terms of components, this page is confusing because it's covering Mapnik rendering, as well as the web front end component known as the 'slippy map'. I'm thinking we should organise the wiki technical information/development pages around different components. A page for each component (See Component overview) With this in mind, we should have a separate page called 'Mapnik' where we could move most of the current contents of this 'Slippy Map' page. -- Harry Wood

OK User:Frederik Ramm has just done that. See the new Mapnik page. Also see Talk:Mapnik for discussion moved from here.

Well done. That's much clearer I reckon. - Harry Wood 14:02, 12 March 2007 (UTC)

Not all of the UK renders

The UK above 54'N doesn't render (More OSM Coming Soon...)

What can I do to get it to render. There is 'some' content there but I doubt many people will even try uploading if they can't see anything that gets uploaded... (I know they can self render it but that's not the main point in my view - its about sharing...)

SBS

See the November archive of the talk mailing list for info, specifically the "calling all python coders for slippy map help" thread. Bruce89 13:32, 18 November 2006 (UTC)

Layer select looks weird

I can't seem to select the osmarender layer when using konqueror... (see image) Ojw 15:25, 28 January 2007 (UTC)

Please UPDATE (see Konqueror 3.5.5). User:jth 23:46, 28 January 2007 (UTC)

Markers in Slippy Map

Availability of Markers in the Slippy Map would be good for marking geocache locations in the map. www.opencaching.de has links to "mapquest" and "google maps" with cache location, see example: http://www.opencaching.de/viewcache.php?wp=OC1822 And this is how it looks like in osm, unfortunately without marker, so it is almost useless for geocachers: http://www.openstreetmap.org/index.html?lat=49.01045&lon=8.40405&zoom=12 If the OSM Slippy Map would be useful for geocachers we might get some attention from them and maybe get some more osm mappers.--Gerchla 10:55, 6 April 2007 (BST)

You can add a marker as follows:

• Double click on the map to centre it at exactly the right place for the marker. It will also zoom in.
• Click '-' to zoom back out one level.
• Click 'permalink' to re-load the page with the lat lon URL parameters populated in the address bar
• Edit the URL parameters in the address bar. Change 'lat' to 'mlat' and 'lon' to 'mlon'.
• Hit enter to reload the page.

You should see a marker. You can share the URL as it appears in the address bar, or post it to geocaching forums etc

See also Browse#Adding a Marker

The real question is... how could we make it a bit easier? :-)

-- Harry Wood 13:00, 23 February 2009 (UTC)

I have entered a Trac request for markers on the slippy map, but it doesn't seem to be very active down there.. --Guerda 08:30, 12 August 2009 (UTC)

Do you mean www.openstreetmap.org or this wiki using the slippymap extension? --firefishy 09:16, 12 August 2009 (UTC)

What is the slippymap extension? --Jakubt 21:16, 22 January 2011 (UTC)

Teardrop damaged

Why is the bottom of the upside down teardrop cut off? Jidanni (talk) 22:36, 8 March 2024 (UTC)

More OpenStreetMap coming soon...

Marking a tile dirty does not mark all sub tiles as dirty. If you get 'More OpenStreetMap coming soon...' on a tile, it means there was no data for that tile and it is now in the queue to be rendered; this should take less than 15 minutes.

I'd just want to let you know, in the east of Hersbruck (Bavaria), I'm now waiting for more than 24 h for some tiles: http://www.openstreetmap.org/?lat=49.512124714750534&lon=11.435998796603524&zoom=18&layers=B0F There are several more regions nearby affected.

You can find a tile status by getting a tile URL (right click and 'get URL for image' or similar):

This does not seem to work with a Mac 1-button mouse. --Keichwa 17:26, 23 August 2007 (BST)

From a user point of view the 'More OpenStreetMap coming soon...' should be displayed not at all. If a tile is rerendered the slippy map should show the old one as long as the new has not been finished. Wouldn't that be a valuable change to the slippy map? --WanMil 09:03, 12 September 2009 (UTC)

Addressable Map with updated URL?

On http://wikimapia.org, the URL is kept up to date : It changes when you move the map. This makes it easy to communicate views by mail. It is not difficult to implement. One just has to replace the '?' in the URL by '#', so the page is not reloaded when the URL is updated. There is an example (using GoogleMaps API) on http://users.skynet.be/chricat/ligne38.html -- xof 27sep2007

Placenames in more than one language

OSM users living in places where placenames legally exist in more than one language would be very grateful if their efforts in tagging ways with name:lang attributes were rewarded by a slight improvement to the openstreetmap.org homepage. In fact, it should just be a matter of changing the osmarender configuration a bit. The current problem is that ways which have their "name" attribute empty but do have one or more "specialisation" of it (in UML parlance) do not have their name rendered at all in the "view" frame, i.e. the streetmap itself. That is very frustrating. Now, which language attribute to pick? Make a try at the default browser language in the HTTP GET header from the client, maybe? Or, more simply, add a tear-down menu with the available languages. That would be, methinks, a very nice addition. --Grungie 08:34, 22 August 2007 (BST)

As I understand it, this kind of thing is not feasible I'm afraid. The Slippy Map uses pre-rendered images, which include the text of place names. Nothing is rendered on-the-fly. The rendering process, takes a lot of CPU power (time), and the images take a lot of disk space, and so there's a limit to the number of different versions of the map we are interested in creating and hosting. We currently have a 'Mapnik' layer and 'Osmarender' layer (and sometimes one or two other interesting experiments on http://informationfreeway.org) but it isn't feasible to create and host a whole new layer for each different language preference. At least not at the moment. I think it is perfectly feasible to render different maps in the way you describe, using different osmarender configurations. We can easily do these things as one-off single-image renderings, but creating a whole new layer on the slippy map is a more difficult undertaking. -- Harry Wood 09:20, 22 August 2007 (BST)

Happily I've been proved wrong. See the map links linked off Map Internationalization. -- Harry Wood 16:03, 28 September 2009 (UTC)

Wrong proportions on the map

The map/satellite image for the front page has completely wrong proportions (e.g. Europe is far too big and Africa is too small (inproportion)). This ought to be fixed...

There's no "right" or "wrong" with the size of different continents, it's just different projections. The only way to get the proportions accurate is to use a 3D globe! --Richard 12:08, 8 October 2006 (BST)

The fact is, however, that the area (in terms of, say, square metres) of Europe is (way) less than that of Africa. Looking at the comparitive sizes of Earth's continents Europe should be about a third of the size of europe. I fully undersatnd that a sphere cannot be accurately mapped onto a rectangle (or any 2d surface...)

Sure, but changing the OSM front-page to an equal-area projection (such as the Gall/Peters one) would assume that the object of the mapping is to prioritise area above all other functions of the map. That isn't necessarily the case. (As it is, it's a fairly academic argument unless someone's prepared to reproject Landsat, which I can't see happening!) Good background on the pros and cons of equal area projections here. --Richard 17:43, 9 October 2006 (BST)

Speaking 3D globe... you can view OSM in KDE Marble -- Harry Wood 16:09, 28 September 2009 (UTC)

Request for Long/Lat of mousepointer on statusbar

Would it be possible for the long and lat to be displayed in real-time on the browser statusbar as the user moves their mouse across the slippy map? tommg

Cant remember the title of the mailing list post where that was discussed. It was decided that real-time lat lon in the status bar was not desirable for the openstreetmap.org homepage map. -- Harry Wood 12:53, 23 February 2009 (UTC)

informationfreeway.org/ shows it though, if you just want to see it. Also to discover a lat-lon using the OSM homepage, double-click on an exact spot (does a zoom but also re-centres), then click 'permalink' and the lat lon values appear in the address bar -- Harry Wood 16:09, 28 September 2009 (UTC)

Contcact, error + wishlist reporting?

It would be pretty good if there were the contacts to discuss or suggest features, report errors etc for the various layers/styles. 13:51, 21 November 2013 (UTC)

Confusing Clean/Dirty status

I know it takes time for new info to "percolate" to all zoom levels, but right now I find confusing information form querying .../status urls for several tiles:

• One tile https://c.tile.openstreetmap.org/19/272508/176179.png/status says "Tile is clean. Last rendered at Sat Feb 03 09:17:07 2018. Last accessed at Sat Feb 03 09:17:22 2018."
• The parent tile https://a.tile.openstreetmap.org/18/136254/88089.png/status says "Tile is clean. Last rendered at Sat Feb 03 08:19:20 2018. Last accessed at Sat Feb 03 08:56:50 2018."

So according to this, the 19-zoom tile is more up to date (by almost an hour) than the 18-zoom tile. And yet only the 18-zomm tile shows a recent change added yesterday? (Also, requesting .../dirty does not seem to change this - tile is still shown as "clean")--hagman (talk) 12:39, 3 February 2018 (UTC)

Slippy Map with CyclOSM layer

I want to display a slippy map on a wiki page with the layer "CyclOSM". Is that possible? Maybe you can give an example.—Preceding unsigned comment added by Geozeisig (talk • contribs) 15:57, 20 January 2021‎

Unfortunately, it is not yet possible. There is a manual at Wiki:Maps, but you can use the tiles listed in the configuration file. I made a request to change the configuration. --Tigerfell  (Let's talk) 20:21, 20 January 2021 (UTC)

Mobile view

The map is not displayed in the mobile view. Can anyone help change this? --geozeisig (talk) 08:13, 29 January 2021 (UTC)

That was reported previously. We are currently stuck at understanding the problem (https://phabricator.wikimedia.org/T266654). --Tigerfell  (Let's talk) 10:41, 29 January 2021 (UTC)

Wish it wouldn't always be in the center of the screen

For images we can use |thumb| and the image will move nicely to the side.

Alas, this Slippy map template is bossy, and only wants to be in the center, offering no way to get it to the side.

Jidanni (talk) 22:39, 8 March 2024 (UTC)