I am not that experienced, especially with the more advanced editors like JOSM and Vespucci. I am learning. Here is a common workflow that I encounter and a recurring problem:
I am out and see some edits that need to be made.
I open Vespucci, download a very small local area, and make some gross changes, intending to finish the details later when I am at the desktop
Once I am at my JOSM desktop, from Vespucci, I export to OSC file.
Open that .OSC file in JOSM
Here is the problem: I can’t easily find my edits in JOSM. Yesterday, I covered several dozen miles and made small edits in a few different spots. I am looking for a way to highlight the differences between what is in my .OSC file and what is on the official OpenStreetMap servers. That way I can zoom in on the stuff I changed and finish it up.
A related problem is that when I have scattered edits everywhere, it’s hard to see where they all are so that I can download latest data (I frequently get, “Requested data is too large for download. Zoom in more.”) But with just the .OSC file, it’s hard to know where to make my bounding boxes, not to mention it’s so low-contrast that I can’t easily see where my edits happened.
Finally, I would probably want to upload my changes in a few different changesets. Example: details about a restaurant (handicap accessibility, opening hours, etc) in one changeset. Then another changeset for the new gas station that I added that is 5 miles away from the restaurant.
All these changes are in the OSC that I exported from Vespucci, but I need a way to easily find them in JOSM and also to break them up into smaller changesets.
I have never loaded an .osc file in JOSM, so completely untested, but maybe you can search all data that you have for “modified” (enter that into the search window) and highlight all your changes from Vespucci in a todo list in JOSM to look at each change you did in detail in the large amount of data that you downloaded into JOSM.
I’m not a JOSM expert, but I don’t believe JOSM accepts .osc files – only .osm files.
The good news: The core format of .osc and .osm is fairly similar, so they could be converted with a bit of scripting (The .osm dialect consumed by OSM uses action attributes instead of wrapping objects in create, modify and delete parent entities).
The (potentially) bad news: In order to do meaningful visual edits, you’ll need the full geometry, i.e. not just nodes that were created/modified, but also the existing unchanged nodes of the ways you ant to continue editing. Not sure if Vespucci writes those when it exports its .osc.
So it appears it’s the lack of full geometries (only changed nodes in the .osc) that’s keeping the OP from seeing the actual edits (without the nodes, JOSM has no idea where to place a way on the map)
No experience either but this is what I would try. Besides if there is nothing but “changes” in the .osc file then you could simply select all and add that to the todo list.
The problem is less one of file format, you could just as well save your work in (J)OSM format and load that in to JOSM, that is your changes including the originally downloaded data, but as has been pointed out, it is more about how you organise your workflow.
IMHO the answer to that depends very much on what you are actually adding/editing and what you typically do in your 2nd pass and why you even want to switch to JOSM. Given you can can create todos for systematic processing of elements just as well in Vespucci, well even that isn’t really necessary since you can just use the review modal to do that.
Searching for “modified” is a great start that I didn’t know about. What I have today is only a couple very small edits, but the next time I come back from an outing with more changes scattered around, this is a great starting point. I will work on using the “Todo Plugins” and the Modified map style then, which other people suggested elsewhere in this thread. Thanks!
