Dowloading tiles for a research project

Good evening everyone !

I am currently a student at university (EPFL) and my research project I need to download around 100k tiles at zoom 20. I was using the api at https://api.openstreetmap.org/api/0.6/map.json but as you guessed it. Got timeout. Now I saw that there was the Overpass API but it is also limited to around 10k tiles per day.

What is my best option ? Download 10k tiles per day for 10 days or is there something else to try ?

If you need a large amount of tiles there are 2 ways folks generally use:

  • Find a suitable tile provider that will serve them to you without limiting you
  • Generate them yourself

Mass scraping the OSM API is generally bad form and, as you’ve notice, discouraged by the API itself.

I saw some providers like mapbox but do they provide OSM data or their own ? Also, I can generate my own raster tiles from the request of the OSM API but I don’t know if other providers will give them to me in a similar form.

What exactly you are trying to download?

Osm data? Rendered images?

You mention using overpass for downloading tiles which does not really make sense. Overpass API does not provide tiles.

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I want to get elements of type node, way and relation in a similar way I got them using “https://api.openstreetmap.org/api/0.6/map.json”. Does Overpass API provide these ?

Why don’t you just download the planet file, split that into pieces (“Create geographical extracts from OSM files”) and maybe filter for what you need using ‘osmium’?

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Downloading data - OpenStreetMap Wiki may be also helpful

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If you want all types of data, everywhere then have a look at the planet file. However, it’s very big - probably more data than you want.

If you want all types of data from one area I’d look at Geofabrik’s download site.

If you want only certain types of data then Overpass (previously mentioned) is likely to be useful. As an example, here is a query for all the “brewing supplies shops” in OpenStreetMap. I got to the query by taginfo; you can search for keys and values used within the OpenStreetMap database and generate Overpass queries too.

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