Finding POI (Points of Interest) on OSM is easy with overpass.turbo, but the user interface is quite intimidating and not always easy to use. Hence I wrote a tool to help you asking the right questions for overpass.turbo and deliver its results on a nice screen layout.
The tool can be found here:
The opening screen shows a great part of the UK and Europe, but it’s always better to zoom in to the area you want to explore. This can be done with the +/- key at the left top corner or by moving/dragging the screen or drawing rectangles. Nothing new with that.
This is the starting screen:
First you have to add the poi (tags) you want to see, and there are two ways to accomplish that:
Manual Input or Assisted Selection.
For Manual input just put any tag in the input field in the well known key=value form (e.g. highway=track).
There is no checking on values here, (but you must use the “=“ sign between two words. So basically you can add anything here (like flaxoa=brikko).
Using Manual input, you can add the tag by simply pressing Enter (you don’t need the Add Tag button on the right).
The normal way of operating is OR mode, which means that AT LEAST one of the tags must be present in the result.
After you entered landuse=grass and landuse=industrial, the screen looks like this:
Pressing the Search Map button the screen turns into this (it might take some time with larger areas):
It reports the number of features found and each feature is a coloured marker (circle) on the map. (Different colours for different keys). Because in my example I choose a large area, it becomes almost useless, although you can click on each circle and view the result on OSM if needed:
If you zoom-in (with the “+” key) it shows the zoom-level and once if the zoom is >14 markers turn into areas for all objects that have an area. Click on an area to see results:
You can zoom-in/out and add more poi if you want to. Click Search Map again if you have changed something.
If you want an object with more tags AT THE SAME time, you should use the AND mode. Finding for highway=residential AND surface=asphalt, click on the AND button, add the tags you want to appear at the same object and press Search Map. Once the results show, you can click on them to get the OSM tags in a pop-up:
If you don’t know exactly the way a key has to be written (or what keys are available), turn to Assisted Selection. The screen shows now 2 input fields: select a key and select a value and by pressing those you see a pop-up with choices: (opm7/8).
You now MUST press Add Tag to enter those values in the searching table. Then press Search Map and again you can click the results on the map:
At any time you can switch between Manual Input and Assisted Selection and keep adding tags to your choices.
OR/AND mode cannot be switched between choices, it is one or the other.
Sometimes the tool shows no results while you are sure there must be some. Pressing Search Map again usually solves the problem.
Please let me know what kind of problems/errors you encounter when using this program.
The program is currently under development and once I have a stable and reliable version the code will be available on my Github channel.
OpenPoiMap 2025 is a follow-up of an earlier program I wrote (in 2016), still available here:
