Tile Downloader

Hello all

I’m a regular OSM uploader, gathering data with OSM Tracker on a bike. I also do some mapping abroad, for which I obviously need to pre-download a set of tiles before I head out. I tried using JTileDownloader, but didn’t have much luck with it, and actually since a laptop upgrade it doesn’t seem to work for me at all.

So I’ve written my own program in Visual Basic. It does pretty much what JTileDownloader was supposed to do, plus it has a slippy-map interface for selecting an area of tiles and it can poll and parse the /status message for previously downloaded tiles, updating those that need it.

I’d love to share it with the community, but whilst developing it, I came across the Tile Usage Policy.

Would the type of application I’ve written contravene this, do you think? If so, did JTileDownloader contravene it too, or was there something specific about it that made it ‘legal’? I seem to remember it would pause for a few seconds after every few tiles - perhaps this was required to abide by the policy.

BTW, does anyone else find things a bit daunting here sometimes? I’m not sure whether I should be asking this in help.openstreetmap.org, forum.openstreetmap.org or one of the mailing lists…

Anyway, thanks for you time

Nick

hi,

one major issue of mass tile downloading is the amount of traffic which is created and some tiles are only generated on demand (e.g. tiles with zoom level 16 or 17). Maybe you should search this forum about this topic, I think it was already discussed several times (especially at the german forum).

Regards

Michael

Mapquest’s open tiles have a more liberal usage policy - see details at http://developer.mapquest.com/web/products/open/map

this seems to be very interesting