Resolving Our Notes (Tips and Progress)

Communities United Kingdom
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Hi all,

Hope you’re all keeping cool and safe in the heat. With a (now blocked) user going through quite a lot of notes earlier, I felt like it’s a good opportunity to raise a new thread about notes here. At the time of writing this particular sentence, the UK currently has 34,970 open notes[1] and is second in the world to Germany with a chasm between us and Italy in third.

In May, we managed to close more notes than there were opened for the first time since October 2025[2], this happened again in June and is currently looking the same for July, although we still have half the month left to go!

Myself, @LordGarySugar, @maxwellward among others have been at it closing what we can and commenting on notes to add new information that people can come back to. While I understand that this may be annoying if the information may still be outstanding and the note has been closed, the aim is not to shut anybody down, but rather encourage people to come back with more information or to solve the note if they can.

@maxwellward has made a site https://osmnotes.maxward.ca/ that’s ideal for looking through notes, including filters that classify them with an approximate difficulty level and a category. There is also an Analytics page for those of us who like stats and graphs. Of course, there are also sites like NotesReview and more mentioned on the 2023 UK Quarterly Project Wiki page (linked later on).

Just shy of 70% of our open notes (approx 24,100 if my maths is correct) are at least 1 year old. This includes businesses, addresses, trees, postcodes, speed limits, you name it. We still have a couple of 4 figure notes and quite a few 5 figure notes open (notes are now well into 7 figures, so this goes to show how long our notes tend to stay open).

Previous UK Quarterly Projects looked at solving notes and fixmes back in 2023 and 2019, with @jayaddison proposing to look at it again for this year’s Q3 project (which ultimately came second in the poll[3]). However, I feel like we should be looking to resolve notes continuously and meaningfully and building a momentum and habit of closing older notes instead of focusing on decreasing the number of open notes for 3 months before moving on to a new project. We can easily do this alongside current projects.

While it’s unrealistic to suggest that we can close all of our notes, and that it’s also true that we shouldn’t just aggressively close notes for the sake of closing them, I’ve admittedly been a bit ruthless with closing notes - mostly looking for instances where OSM has been updated but the note hadn’t been closed, or closing notes without sufficient information (perhaps this is how we need to be considering the age of some of our notes?). I have even come across instances where a note has been made and like, two businesses have come and folded in that time.

The aim of this thread is not to be a void in which to vent about how many notes there are/what is in notes, but rather how we can go about this as a community while sharing our thoughts, tips, resources, and tracking our progress (be it your own, your local area or the UK community in general). We’ve got people, we’ve also got plenty of tools at our disposal now, let’s do it.

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Links to resources and tools

Monthly progress reports starting here

  • July 2026 - 35,118 → 31,978 (-3,140)
  • August 2026 - 31,978 →
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Thank you for making this thread, I think it’s important to have some more focus on solving notes in the UK community. It’s clear that we are struggling to keep the number of notes under control, as shown by the 6 straight months of an increase in the total note count since October 25. Despite having the same number of open notes as Germany, they open and close 3x as many notes per month, meaning the time we take to resolve a note on average is significantly longer. This I think is the main problem - where we are swamped by the number of notes, we can’t respond to new information being raised by StreetCompleters and other mappers. Lots of good notes that could lead to map updates risk being overlooked for years because of this.

As Ceirios hasn’t touched on it in her original post, I’ll share some common resources and methods I use for solving notes remotely that might be useful to others.

  • websites and social media - many shops and businesses mentioned in notes can actually be added remotely if their existence can be confirmed online - nearly all businesses have some kind of online presence. Social media pages like Instagram, Facebook or even TikTok often have photos of the shopfront which can be used to identify which building or position they should be placed in (if the address of the shop is not already mapped).
  • OS openmap - things like streams, farm names and road names can often be found.
  • OS maps on NLS - detailed 1:1250 and 1:2500 Ordnance Survey maps from 1945-75 are available on NLS, they can be used in most urban areas to add things like housenumbers where areas have not changed in the 50 years since.
  • local news reports - often major chains opening or closing will be mentioned in a local paper, which often contain a picture of the branch too
  • add a node in the approximate location - if someone has opened a note highlighting a missing housenumber or shop, it can be difficult to know exactly where it should go (especially if the buildings are not mapped). In those cases I drop the node where the note is and add a fixme= to highlight that the location is approximate.
  • give feedback to StreetComplete mappers - sometimes notes will be opened about missing shops or pois - these can be added by using the places or things overlay, so letting people know about this can help them to add nodes without having to open notes

I will also share my thoughts on ruthlessness - a portion of the open notes are made up by notes which are in practice unsurveyable, incredibly vague or not useful. I do think that notes should provide some useful information about what should be changed or what needs to be surveyed. There are a bunch of notes that aren’t necessary as they ask questions that will be automatically prompted by StreetComplete, for example a restaurant without a name= tagged doesn’t need a note, nor does a parcel locker without a brand.

Where notes can’t be solved remotely, I like to add a hashtag to be able to filter them out (or highlight them specifically). If updated aerial imagery is needed to update a development, I add #waitforimagery, where a survey is needed I add #surveyme. This hashtag has the added benefit of showing the note prominently on StreetComplete which should make them more likely to be checked and answered.

Overall I would summarise by saying, let’s keep solving! There are huge numbers of notes that can be actioned right now (particularly StreetComplete notes) and not enough hands on deck. Just a few dedicated note-solving sessions a month would make a huge difference.

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Esri has updated in some parts of England, that may help some people who are waiting on imagery.

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Does anyone have good techniques for making surveying trips to close notes?

I can see notes in some apps (osmAnd, and the notes screen of Everydoor) but I don’t have filter options but I that’s only okay if I happen to be near a surveyable note). I’d possibly like to make a “hit list” and then have the app help guide me to the nearest note on that list, solve it, then guide me to the next. Even better if I could plot a route to pass several.

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Here is a nice step-by-step tutorial I wrote for adding “little things”:

Now, when I see those types of StreetComplete Notes, I just link people straight to that.

I noticed that a lot of users don’t even know that feature was a possibility, and all they needed to do is click that little button in the upper right! :slight_smile:

And yes, I think projects like this are fun.

When I first joined OSM, I had a bunch of fun fixing/closing hundreds of Notes. I quickly learned about all sorts of random objects and weird things from the OSM Wiki.

And some of the most fun was answering Street Complete users in less than 30 minutes!

My absolute favorite was when I added 1 user’s information=guidepost—a few minutes after he took the photo—before he probably even made it back to his car in the parking lot! :slight_smile:

Or where a user took a photo of random “workout equipment” in the parks and had no clue what it was:

(The photo looked exactly like the ones I saw in the Wiki, so I instantly knew what type it was and was able to tag it within minutes! Then I was able to teach him about it too in the closing Comment!)

Edit: And I’ve found Pascal Neis’s site is the ultimate way to see Notes and be able to search through them.

For example, here’s all of the latest UK Notes:

Below the little graphs in the upper-left, you can very quickly just search for a keyword like “bench” and quickly fix-up all those Notes with:

Then, once you “see” all these random things people are reporting… you can’t “unsee” it… so every single bench you’ll see in the wild will now have to get better too!

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I’d like to add one more bullet point here:
Throw the address and nothing else into Google and see what it finds. If a POI currently exists at that address it is likely Google can find something of it, like the aforementioned social media presence or website.

The drawback of this method is that you can find no longer existing POIs as well, that are just lingering around online.

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If you have a route with multiple waypoints OSMand can calculate the shortest route (or a good enough approximation) between them. I don’t know if there is an automated or otherwise convenient way to set notes as waypoints. So, the worst case workflow would be to set a marker (those little flags) for each note you want to visit. Then start the navigation and add the new markers as waypoints. Lastly, tap the edit button next to the waypoints (Zwischenziel in german, I don’t know what exactly the UI shows in english), then go to sort → door-to-door and let OSMand do its magic. You now have to shortest rout from your start via all added waypoints to your end point.

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Ah! This thread is why I’ve been getting so many emails recently. Ty for all the work you’re doing closing notes. I find closing notes with the current tools available to be insufferably slow and find I’m much better suited to things like adding addresses from OS maps or adding new buildings; so I really appreciate seeing all of the survey notes getting resolved.

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I remembered about Random OSM Note, perhaps that might be helpful for some who want to tackle notes but don’t know where to start

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This thread inspired me to look at my own notes.
I strongly use the notes for two instances: where I don’t know tags or need to do a complex edit at the computer; and where surveying is really needed. As a result, I still have 7 pages of unresolved notes! I will try to get in the habbit of writing #surveyme when appropriate.

I managed to close lots. In several cases someone has commented the answer on the note, it’s been mapped (possibly by the same person), but it’s not been closed. Easy wins!*

**To see your notes go to osm.org, click your face/name in the top right and click “My Profile”. One of the top links of your profile is “My Notes” and you can change the status to “Unresolved”.

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We’ve got over 1000 fewer open notes now since this post was made, thanks everyone for all the hard work so far! Let’s keep at it :slight_smile:

I don’t want to detract from the Quarterly Project and I have commented there that there are quite a few open notes related to toilets and drinking water that might want solving.

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I used this last night and got to close some long-forgotten notes for issues that I didn’t know how to resolve then (cough 9 years ago cough), but I do know how to resolve now.

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The Random OSM Note website is worryingly addictive!

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Guess this explains why my feed for notes in Scotland has been so busy recently!

As touched on above with the quarterly project topics, we also have an abundance of fixme tags - almost 80,000 in the UK which is more than double the amount of notes.

Unlike notes which can be shown on osm.org or StreetComplete etc, the problem with fixmes is they are basically hidden unless you use a QA tool or look for them in overpass turbo, or get shown them by iD when editing.

I’m sure many of them could also be resolved remotely, or their contents copied into a new note to help other mappers go out and #surveyme the issue. Someone added fixmes in my area but it was months before I noticed them - whereas if they were notes I’d have spotted and surveyed them quicker.

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image
image505×129 7.73 KB

Maybe that’s enough notes for now?

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Thanks for all your hard work :clap: :clap:

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With regard to Fixmes, years ago I wrote this to export notes and fixmes from OSM in a given area. I use that on a Garmin handheld, but anything that can display GPX waypoints can use it. It’s useful for showing “fixmes near where I physically am”.

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SCEE also shows fixmes as a red dot. But it’s still not a great system because a lot of them can’t be solved by a survey or can’t be fixed in SCEE. I agree that many of them should really be notes instead, particularly if they relate to a survey, as nobody is ever gonna see them otherwise. Lots of them are pretty vague and useless or are incredibly outdated. Not actually a good system for getting things fixed. :man_shrugging:

But I would suggest trying to keep the focus of the thread on notes. We (myself, @ceirios, @maxwellward & others) wanted to have this thread specifically to promote a year-round effort to keep the number of notes under control, not just as another quarterly ‘fixmes and notes’ campaign which makes good progress in 3 months and is then forgotten about. I would suggest that notes should only be created from fixmes where necessary and useful, to avoid creating a sudden wave of new notes that we have no capacity to solve.

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Or just trivial “foot” or bench note notes. I really like vital alerts: closed / open notes, huge lasting problems to local passers by or most total users of a note’s object/node. I wish there can be made a formal dropdown (higher category) of highly constrained existential-priority notes (Top Notes) like paid for maps like OS maps purely uses them for, with strict subcategories. Most other notes such as opening hours and backrests/armrests are immediately seen in public image searches (geograph and google streetview mode, for more normal people - non OSM editors) as well as not at all what most people want to see when viewing major changes/disruptions in their daily lives. 95-98% of notes in the UK are such minor concerns they totally devalue any general browsing of them that is prioritise sacrosanctly the most blithe, casual public note maker but instead should prioritise the voluntary workers’ experience. They are mapping communities notes and certainly of diverse importance with the skew towards pedantic.