Best tag for indicating anything that can charge portable electronic devices

Power sockets, USB A / C plugs… What’s the best / proper / most wildly used tag? It would be handy so that I can search for anywhere to charge my mobile device, whether it’s amenity=power_supply, power=outlet, amenity=device_charging_station (as you can see the list goes on, and it can be very hit-and-miss). Instead here the focus is the function the element on the map serves, a bit like ‘drinking water’ (there are many ways of providing drinking water etc.).

Thanks :>.

This is actually something I started tagging at some point, specifically as a place attribute à la toilets=*. I tag power_supply=yes on the place POI and then for more detail I use socket:*=* tags. I actually even made a very basic MapComplete theme using this tagging concept. (It’s not quite fully ready for primetime, but it does display and edit data for NEMA 5-15, NEMA 5-20, and USB-A.)

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Also for a more direct answer to your question: I’m pretty sure there’s no tagging scheme that’s been formally approved. As a POI attribute, power_supply=* was originally made for camp sites but my tagging is a pretty straightforward extension. As its own thing, as you noted, there are quite a few options. I will at least single out power=outlet and caution that that one’s intended for micromapping individual outlet locations, so it’s a little different from the others. As far as usage, I see from taginfo that amenity=device_charging_station has 1073 uses vs. 728 for amenity=power_supply. To my knowledge, those are your options to pick from.

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To make things a little more complicated, there is, service:electricity It is added via MapComplete, among other things.

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I will use power_supply=yes then on Vespucci (that’s the quickest way at the moment right?)

I bet a graphical icon for organic maps too (the most popular OSM client) would make it widely used, but I suppose that’s a whole other topic (I’d be happy to work on the technical stuff myself :), feel free to send me useful wiki links / other).

So you mean this right:

'Cause it’s definitely a highly requested feature, in fact I’ve seen more than one case in which it was switched for an electric vehicle charging station, which is definitely not what we want!

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Yes, that’s right. As far as your Organic Maps idea, if you want to propose that directly to Organic Maps, you can try opening an issue (or submitting a pull request, if you feel confident trying to implement the feature yourself) on the Organic Maps GitHub repository; however, you may be able to strengthen the case a bit by first creating a formal proposal, which power_supply=* has still never gotten, to my knowledge (though the wiki page does refer to an abandoned proposal from 2009 pertaining specifically to camp sites). I don’t feel like I have the time these days to do so myself, but if you’d like to give it a shot, I’d be happy to provide whatever support and resources I can.