Hello
I am trying to make an animation of a car travelling across Europe for my holiday video. I’ve been using GPX animator which is quite cool but after a few renders it fails to download any more OSM maps.
I suspect this might be a deliberate limitation and was wondering how I get an API key for OSM?
Thanks
Paul
There are no API keys for the map tiles if that’s what you’re referring to, and bulk downloading tiles for offline use is not permitted by the usage policy.
Which version of GPX Animator are you using? All but the most ancient should be caching the map tiles they pull from whatever server you selected.
If I recall correctly, it will age its cache entries out after 24 hours (been a long while since I donated that code to that project and the details are hazy in my memory). I see in the preferences for my copy of GPX Animator that the caching is set to 3 days. I am not sure if that is a setting I made or if that is a newer default.
That caching logic served two purposes: 1) Keep from hitting map servers too much and exceeding any rate limiting there. And 2) speed up rendering by avoiding repeated pulling of the same tile(s) from servers. The result is that any given tile should only be pulled from the server once during the time frame that you are creating your travel video.
Unless you are doing multiple runs with parameters changed enough each run to require pulling different tiles, it should be able to do a very long trip without exceeding the limits set by OSM. Last I used GPX Animator was a year ago for a trip of about 900 miles round trip and there was no issue with hitting the OSM servers too hard. If you are bored out of your mind, the video I made is at A Visit to the north rim of the Grand Canyon in an Ioniq 5 EV - Spectra Video
Edit: I used tiles from OpenTopoMap for the driving animation and tiles from CalTopo for the hiking. So any limits OSM has on their server were not encountered. That does suggest that if another tile server has a style that is acceptable, you may want to simply change the server specification in GPX Animator.
Still, I am a bit surprised that you ran into a limit. I don’t believe I saved my dash camera’s GPX data after making the video but I am tempted to see if I still have it and what would happen if I used the OSM servers for the tiles.
Thanks everyone… I’ve discovered it is because i tried to zoom in and some of the tiles don’t support that! When zoom is 0 then they work again 