I recently came across the NEWS of the discontinuation of the Bing Maps Rest Services which includes BING MAPS IMAGERY API.
On the OSM side, is there any news about what will happen with Bing Aerial and its use in OSM editors?
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The relevant bit (for those devs that didn’t cheat and actually retrieved meta data and API key via the Bing API) is Migrate Bing Maps Get Imagery Metadata API to Azure Maps Get Map Tile API - Microsoft Azure Maps | Microsoft Learn
It naturally raises the question if Bing/Azure/whatever is still important enough to write custom code (and everything that comes with it) to handle this single special case. A dozen years ago the answer was clearly yes, now days it is probably meh.
PS: this is naturally something the devs should be hearing about through the EWG.
For those of us who do not have satellite images offered by local governments, Bing Aerial is very important.
ESRI Aerial offers low zoom imagery outside Europe and North America and BING Aerial is the best alternative.
Unfortunately, the migration to Azure Maps includes a Debit/Credit Card and an ApiKey that no one will want to expose in the CS to avoid unwanted consumption.
It remains important to offer satellite imagery alternatives in OSM to avoid the temptation to approach satellite imagery providers that do not support OSM licenses.
This is a bigger problem outside Europe and North America where mappers do not have access to local aerial imagery.
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Bing requires/required an account and an API key too (don’t know about Credit Card).
There are 2 methods=
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Retrieve the full metadata as Vespucci does by exposing the ApiKey in keys2.txt.
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Retrieve only the URL by making the Aerial style metadata request and where only the ApiKey is used in the request URL. Of course, with this method you have to manually update the “g=” / “og=” parameter.
I use Bing Maps styles for a personal project, I decided to go ahead and start the migration to Azure Maps, the first thing you need to do is link a credit/debit card to create the Azure Maps account.
I think Microsoft will be more than willing to support OSM editors, so I don’t think this will be a big deal, if you ignore the work necessary to get the new API working.
Of specific note, JOSM uses a layer called AerialOSM (and I think other editors use that layer as well).
We have until 2025-06-30 (around 10 months) if this ends up being a problem.
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That probably is simply a bug that they never got around to fixing as you were supposed to get the actual key by querying the meta data.
I don’t think it’s a bug, the metadata query is documented. This is the query I have been making for several years to obtain the latest images available for my personal project.
https://dev.virtualearth.net/REST/v1/Imagery/Metadata/AerialOSM?key=YOUR-APIKEY&output=xml
In some places, Bing imagery is the only imagery with decent resolution available. I would be severely impacted if we were to lose access to it.
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“Error: Attribution is not loaded yet” happened sudden today
It was working as normal yesterday.
Bings meta data API has always been quite flaky and some times very very slow.
Simply retry in a while as there are no known issues right now. It is likely that the account the JOSM API key is associated with exceeded its quota or had a similar key specific issue a couple of days back, but what I’ve heard that went away again.
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It working back again. Thank microsoft and all aerial imagery provider.
Quick note to say that the EWG is aware of the situation, and is starting to discuss with people at Microsoft about how to manage the transition in the best way for OSM.
For timeline, the original announcement gives a end date of June 30, 2028 for those with enterprise plan. Martin Raifer thinks this is the plan our keys are issued under; but we are confirming. It’s a few years away, but we should wait to get a transition plan in place asap.
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A few additional comments from the technical side of things:
- The new Azure Maps API is much more similar to “standard” (zoom+x/y) tile services. So, there will luckily be no more need for dedicated custom code (e.g. to calculate quadtile-id) and the switch should be straight-forward for OSM editor applications.
- I’ve encountered a small issue in that the new way to get the tiles’ metadata (in particular the vintage date of the aerial imagery) is currently not possible in a browser environment (e.g. iD), as the service does not send the required CORS headers to access the HTTP headers containing the metadata. We’ve already reported this issue to Microsoft.
- As of now, there doesn’t seem to be a way to access Bing Streetside imagery via the Azure Maps API.
- From my limited tests, Azure Maps appears to deliver exactly the same tiles as Bing Maps.
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Great to hear the progress!
I (as MapComplete developer) also got the heads-up email today. My API key will expire around may '25.
Will there be a key shared to use with all editor programs? Or should I apply separately? For the current key, another contributor was so friendly to create an account for me (Tordans IIRC)
I got the same email today but I found the Azure API documentation completely incomprehensible - yes the new tile URLs are nice and standard and simple but the new requirements around authenticating are something else entirely.
I eventually gave up after completely failing to find any way to convince the entirely hostile Azure console to issue me any sort of credentials.
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Very bad idea. The whole point I asked the EWG to arrange things with MS was to prevent everybody doing their own thing as previously and to avoid key sharing. I assume Mikel will inform us when things have been worked out.
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(Small nitpick: the way you quoted me and the way you answered, it is very unclear if the “bad idea” is about “me asking a key separately” or about “me reusing a key provided by the EWG”.)
From the other sentence, I assume that the EWG will provide a key to me, shared by all editor-programs? Sound great as it is less work for me!
I’ll just patiently wait for more news then.
The exact same thing happened to me, I tried as much as my little knowledge allowed me. I received the email today indicating that my REST API services will end on 30/06/2024.
I got to the point of creating a project and subproject. I followed the tutorials as far as I could understand. After a while of looking for a certain menu I understood that the menus in the authentication examples were different from the current menus of the platform.
Although Bing Maps services have been very useful to me in recent years for personal projects, I understood that I must move forward and not complicate things with unfriendly platforms.