I’m adding rooftop solar to already mapped buildings, using aerial imagery to spot them. I find this hard to do methodically because it’s hard to tell where I’ve already inspected and where I need to pan to next.
Is there a way to use a kind of “fog of war” tool in the iD or JOSM editors?
I’m thinking something I could “paint”, so to speak, with my mouse as I observe an area, like a big circular paint brush tool in a paint program.
It would be nice if this allowed me to save it too so I could reuse it over time without having to start from scratch.
It seems to map where my viewport has already looked. So this is exactly what I was looking for. I just need to test whether it persists this “seen” data.
Found that it didn’t persist the seen area, even if I had JOSM save the in progress session and resume it. Notified the author/maintainers. Will see what they say about it.
Still though, a massive improvement over my old workflow. And maybe if I can’t get it to persist the seen area, I could combine this tool with DAMN or Tasking Manager to have a hierarchy of tracking. The tasking manager could track areas long term, and within each area (which could be relatively large), MarkSeen could track what’s been done within that area during a single JOSM session.
Slightly off topic, but in case anyone comes here after searching for tracking seen area for solar mapping in particular, this is the preset I created to help me use JOSM as quickly as I was using iD for this:
After learning how to use the preset, I read up on multipolygons in JOSM to learn that the workflow for creating a solar panel array where there are spots inside it empty is to create the outer way, then the inner ways, then use the Create multipolygon tool (or ctrl-b) with all of the ways selected at the same time, then apply that preset with the merged result still all selected.
I haven’t yet figured out how to select the entire multipolygon after doing this though (e.g. to add more tags to the entire array). I also haven’t figured out a keyboard shortcut yet for applying the preset.
Depends on how far zoomed in you are panning around in search for your panels. JOSM has a setting which shows what data area you’ve downloaded and that what has not yet been. It is darker and has a diagonal pattern over.
At any rate, as you pan around, the plugin fetches the data for the areas that come into your viewport which has not been seen before.
The data file can be saved, the restriction of course memory. Yesterday had 7.5gb worth in memory and JOSM kept running smoothly (16GB ram)
Edit: Created 2 presets, one for the standard panel assemblies and one for solar farms as their tags are different… generator: v plant:. Here the one I use when tagging panels
I just tried it, and I don’t think it works well for my use case. If I don’t edit anything before closing JOSM, it never prompts me to save a session before I finish exiting. So then the next time I start JOSM, I lose that progress. I could work around that by editing a node or something just to trigger a session or by keeping one rooftop solar way not yet uploaded every time I finish.
Did not think of it, but routinely do a “Save session” and assign a name I’d remember at the start then save manually before exiting. No idea if somewhere in the dungeons of the advanced preferences there’s a line that can be set to true/false that would force to always ask for saving before exiting, simply to preserve the environment one worked in.
Both Vespucci and JOSM have functionality to create todos associated with objects.
I’ve never used it with JOSM, but in Vespucci you can simply select the objects (probably best with a search expression), in this case buildings, generate the todos, then just jump from todo to todo marking them as completed once you’ve done whatever you wanted to do, and I assume it works similarly in JOSM.
I like this suggestion too. If I think of the work hierarchically, I could use Tasking Manager to arrange efforts across the whole province with other volunteers too, JOSM’s MarkSeen to pan around each Tasking Manager unit of work and add todos for it, and then go through the todos later to get the actual rooftop solar mapped.
