Latest ortophotos and new+demolished buildings

Communities Eesti (Estonia)
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For many years latest ortophotos were available for mapping in Estonia. This typically helped in figuring out if building, road or some other object exists or not. However 2025 ortophotos have not been uploaded. There has never been such a long delay. I’ve called Ruumiamet couple of times and they’ve said ortophotos will be available, but never given a date. This all may have happened due to defence or some other reasons.

So actual ortophotos are from 2023 and 2024. This means that many buildings that you see in reality do not exist any more. To avoid the later adding of nonexisting objects, I always try not to delete them, but to tag them as demolished:building=yes

This also means that new buildings and roads are shown in ortophotos as being in the middle of fields, forests or parking lots. Unless you have exact local knowledge, please do not remove them.

Alternatives? As of 2026/01 Bing and Mapbox have compared to Ruumiamet older satphotos, Esri sometimes has slightly newer ones. And from streetlevel Mapillary may be of best help.

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Vaata ka: Maa- ja ruumiamet plaanib geoportaali andmeid üldisemaks muuta | Eesti | ERR

In English: Land and Spatial Board to make publicly available map data less detailed | News | ERR

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I feel like we should write to Kati or someone else in the MaRu and ask for an explicit permission and a special link for OSM editing software. This is the way some other companies (including Mapbox and Maxar, up to a certain point) have conducted in the past.

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Defense is only the silent reason. Officially someone complained to õiguskantsler that imagery violates their privacy. And unofficially it also contributes that last year MaRu was restructured under new ministry. From technical side, MaRu also got new cameras last year and their lawyers were bit worried if such high quality is allowed. Spoiler: the actual quality in Tallinn is not significantly better than before.

I wrote few posts here and there.. but it doesn’t make any impact.

You can request new imagery with teabenõue, but that can’t be added to editor directly. Maybe getting shared API key for OSM and storing it in Editor Layer index may help.. Mait is probably go-to person for initial discussion of what they can actually organize and then submit request to Kati or others.

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